% 



w 



SlV 



oV 






\ ^. 



<o- 



'O 



X 



< 






x * A 






V\^ 



v> "^ 



L"« 



* "*, <* 



•. v 



sPq- 



-0 <", y .:. V "* 

% 



& s 



w 



%s s 



tf 






:J"^ 



*% 



■0 



,-0' 



«5 ^> 



x ^. 






0> ,. < '- , ^c- 






7- "f 



fP\v 



8 * 



.0- 



fir -■ - . ■ . . n 



■/- J " r V , - •■■- , "*- ' N r>> «* * o , *«2- 
" i c V s s r /> «-* \ - C" 



^ 



<-p 






V ' 









•*e 



> s ^ 







7-£><- %-^zzl 7 




THE WORLD WAS HIS AUDIENCE" 



T. DeWitt Talmage 

His Life and Work 

BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 



EDITED BY 

REV. LOUIS ALBERT BANKS, D.D. 

IN CONJUNCTION WITH 

BENJAMIN J. FERNIE, A.M., and GEORGE H. SANDISON, Ph.D., 

Associate Editors of THE CHRISTIAN HERALD 



WITH INTRODUCTION BY HIS SON 

Rev. Frank DeWitt Talmage, D.D. 

Contains Dr. Talmage's Life History and the Picturesque Story of his Career 
and his Travels. Also Many Tributes Paid to the World's Greatest 
Preacher by the World's Master Minds 



WITH NUMEROUS EXCLUSIVE ILLUSTRATIONS 



" The American people, irrespective of denominational differences, have a pride in the ability and 
public services of Dr. Talmage. His influence for good, in the direction of public sentiment, extends far 
beyond his own church and his own congregation ; it is felt all over our country, and even beyond the 
seas." WM. McKINLEY. 



THE ONLY AUTHORIZED EDITION 



EATON & MAINS 

NEW YORK 



V 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

IUN. 7 1902 

Copyright entry 
CLASS O/XXc. NO, 



COPY B'. 



Copyright, 1902, By O. W. Binkerd. 
Entered at Stationers' Haix, 
London England. 



Ai,l Rights Reserved. 



• •• *•••••• • ••••» 

• €••••••• • ••• 

•i e • • *•• • ••• ••• • • 






INTRODUCTION 




BY 

Rev. Frank DeWitt Talmscge, D.D. 

HEN a great man dies, the pens of many writers are immediately 
dipped into the ink-wells to write his biography. The publishing 
houses oil their presses and push through their copies. The 
market is filled with the different productions. Most of these 
biographies will be advertised by literary pirates. A publishing 
house will sharpen its scissors, paste together a mass of facts 
which have been cut from the daily newspapers, join together the connecting 
links with statements sometimes true, oftener false. The public is then sup- 
posed to come and trade at its stand. Hardly were my father's lips closed in 
death when the daily newspapers had announcements from at least six different 
publishing house that a life of T. De Witt Talmage was about to be published. 
Agents were wanted to sell the same 

Some of Doctor Talmage's nearest friends came together and decided to 
send forth a book as a message of love, which would state the true facts in 
reference to his life : a book which the readers of Doctor Talmage's sermons 
could understand and appreciate. The result of that undertaking will be 
found within the covers of this volume. 

A TASK OF LOVE 

Asked to write an introduction to this biographical edition, I comply 
gladly. The editors of this book have known my father intimately and two 
of them have been identified with him for many years, as editorial associates, 
on The Christian Herald. They not only worked with but they loved my father. 
Nothing has gone into this book except the material they personally have fur- 
nished or passed upon. Theirs has been a task of love. 

in 



INTRODUCTION 

The public and private life of a great man can never be entirely separated. 
If we love to read the sermons which Doctor Talmage preached, we also want 
to peep into the study where they were written. We want to see the farm- 
house where once played the boy who afterwards became the greatest preacher 
of his day. We want to find out the characteristics which made his wonderful 
career possible. All these facts can be found upon the written pages of this 
volume. 

The first two chapters are to me of especial interest. A plain, genealogical 
table may not mean much to some, but to others it implies everything. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes once said that the preparations for the ultimate success of 
•every child ought to begin at least one hundred years before it was born. 
Such a preparation is found in my father's life. His mind and body were not 
the result of a mere haphazard chance. He came from good stock. There 
was royal blood in his veins. Not the blood of a petty king or queen, whose 
-only claim to earthly fame was due to the fact that they once wore a royal 
■crown; but all his ancestors were true, godly men and women, who were the 
sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. There is no more beautiful 
-filial testimony in literature than that which Dr. Talmage gives here in 
reference to his consecrated father and mother. No parents can open the first 
leaves of this book without realizing that their lives must be perpetuated, for 
better or for worse, in the lives of their children. 

PREACHING TO THE WHOLE WORLD 

One of the most helpful results of this book is the proof that God hath 
made of one blood all peoples who dwell upon the face of the earth. The 
human heart is the same everywhere. In the palace, we find the tear glittering 
upon the eyelid, as surely as we hear the sob in the poor man's hut. Without 
any doubt, the great work of my father's life was the weekly publication of his 
printed sermons. Those sermons were eagerly read by the rich and the poor 
alike. The steamer carried them across the sea. They were found in the 
miner's cabin as well as in the merchant's home. As a result of this weekly 
publication, when my father started upon his travels, we find him known and 
welcomed everywhere. This book opens for us the door by which we can 
enter the throne-room and find out that princes and princesses live the same 
kind of a family life as do we. As the book leads us everywhere in Dr. Tal- 
mage's travels, it also tells us that the plain minister of the Gospel can have 

TV 



INTRODUCTION 

the world for an audience, because the human heart is the same everywhere — 
the same sinful, sorrowing, aching, dying heart. 

This book teaches how much a man may accomplish if he will only change 
his line of work — only vary his daily occupations. Mr. Gladstone was once 
asked how he could accomplish so much and yet live. He answered his ques- 
tioner in Yankee fashion, by asking him another question : " Do you know 
why the stage horses, traveling a certain road, near London, die much sooner 
than horses traveling another kind of road? Because the first road is a per- 
fectly level road. The stage horses there are compelled to use the same set 
of muscles and therefore they soon wear out." One day Mr. Gladstone was 
delivering an address in Parliament ; the next, he was presiding at a Cabinet 
meeting ; the next, translating Homer ; the next, writing a magazine article upon 
some theological discussion ; the next, with ax, he was felling the huge oak at 
Hawarden. Change of occupation brings into play a new set of physical and 
mental muscles. Stand for awhile and it rests you to sit. Be seated for awhile 
and it relieves you to lie down. Rest in bed for awhile and it invigorates you 
to walk. Recreation does not necessarily imply the opportunity to loaf. Rest 
can often come from change of work. This book proves that Dr. Talmage 
was one of the busiest men that ever lived. It also shows him in many different 
occupations. He never lived in a routine. One day we find him in the pulpit : 
the next, as an editor ; the next, as raising money for famine-struck India ; 
the next, on a journey to Russia, to distribute breadstuffs which had been 
raised by The Christian Herald for starving peasants ; the next, as a lecturer; 
the next, as an evangelist. The musical instrument of his life had a thousand; 
strings instead of one string. All the different notes which were sounded by 
him blend into a harmony of sweetest music. 

AN INDISPENSABLE BOOK 

This book ought to be placed upon the library shelf of every theological 
student in the land. It may be an impossibility to change the habits of an old 
minister. It is possible for this book to mould the theological student's life 
into years of future usefulness. From the first word of the first line on the 
first page, to the last word of the last line on the last page, it emphasizes the 
truth that the great lesson of Dr. Talmage's life was to preach his beliefs and 1 
not his doubts. It is a very easy matter to become a skeptic ; scientific mys- 
teries as well as theological mysteries are piled around every one as high as 

V 



INTRODUCTION 

the Himalayas. It does not take a very large finger, placed en the eyelid, to 
shut out the light of the sun. It does not take many sermons, revelling in 
doubts, to destroy the spiritual belief of any congregation. I fear there is 
too much infidelity lurking behind the modern pulpits. The worst enemies ol 
Jesus Christ are not those found without, but those who are entrenched within 
the four walls of the church edifices. This book rings true. It portrays Dr. 
Talmage as a believer ; it proves him to be a student of the Bible, it opens his 
study door to find him with the " Word of God " in his hand which he is not 
afraid to accept in its entirety. 

THE MINISTERIAL "DEAD-LINE" 

This book ought to be also welcomed by the great church, because it 
shows that an aged minister's last days can be his most useful days. Church 
congregations have their fads, as well as individuals. There is a fashion to-day 
of talking about the " dead-line " in the Christian ministry. Some congrega- 
tions claim that when a minister has passed the fiftieth mile-stone, he has passed 
the "dead-line" of his usefulness, and ought to retire. Some congregations place 
the "dead-line" at even a younger age. All over the land, we find that there 
is a tendency, almost amounting to a fashion, for the few to prefer a youthful, 
untried preacher in the pulpit, instead of a matured man. My father's life 
proves that such a theory may be wrong ; and if a minister does his duty, and 
ceases not to be a close and diligent student, the theory is wrong. 

My father's influence was cumulative. He did not spring into sight 
suddenly as a meteor. His life influence was like the rising sun. His twilight 
was even more glorious than his mid-noon. His mind was always reaching out 
to investigate new fields of knowledge. The arrow of death felled him when 
he was preaching in the far-off" capital of Mexico. Hundreds of his sermons 
have been published and are preserved for the reader in permanent form. This 
biography is the only book which has been written up to date, by men who 
were conversant with the inner thoughts and writings of Dr. Talmage's life. 



~7^fc~*^ %V^i5^ — /* 



VT 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 

A special commission — Filling a need of the times — The humble home- 
stead — Saxon ancestry — Puritans in exile — Two brothers founders of the 
family — Settlement in New Jersey — A revival episode — A grandmother's 
prayers — Peniel in a barn — A ministerial angel — Dr. Talmage's tribute 
to his aunt — The almond tree in blossom — A lifelong struggle — A typical 
American life — Christianity in politics — A pious mother's influence — The 
hands of benediction I 7"3° 

BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 

Love of country life — The old homestead — A group of notable sons and 
daughters — The missionary son — A test of consecration — Distinguished 
service in China — A valued pastor in the home field — The cost of send- 
ing a boy to college — Home economies vividly portrayed — The youngest 
member of the family — The old cradle — Farm pets — The last day in the 
old home 3 I_ 45 



MAKING A START 

Leaving college — Youthful honors and ambitions — Deciding for Christ — 
Preaching in the woods — The furnishing of the parsonage — A surprised 
pastor — Emancipation from manuscript in the pulpit — Gaslights that 
were accommodating — His sermonic mode 46-5 1 

BUILDING A FOUNDATION 

Pastorates at Belleville, Syracuse and Philadelphia — A flattering call — The 
fragrant weed — A temptation overcome — Growing in fame as a preacher 
— His style of delivery — Eloquent with every inch of his body — The secret 
of his popularity — A unique style of pulpit oratory — A temperance 
l esson — T ne wreck of a soul — How he nailed a slander from his Phila- 
delphia pulpit 5 2 "6° 

VII 



TABLE OF CONTEXTS 

THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 

An unexpected call from seventeen persons — The nrst Tabernacle — Attack and 
vindication — City mission work — Preaching to the world through a 
syndicate — Dr. Klopsch's influence on Dr. Talmage's career — A tour 
through " underground New York " — Fire and rehabilitation — The 
" Rainbow " Sermon — His steady growth in fame and usefulness — A 
talk on sermonic preparation — His three lessons in elocution 61-72 

THE MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION 

Dr. Talmage's graphic story of his descent into the Inferno of social vice 
and what he saw there — A terribly realistic picture of the sins of modern 
society — His police escort — The start — Coarseness of vice — Country 
boys led astray — A timely warning — A woman's face — The brink of an 
abyss — Wealthy sinners — A typical den — Rottenness of society — Who 
are responsible ? 73~&4 

THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 

The returned Magdalen — A visit to the purlieus of death — Escaping the 
snare — Debris of ruined homes — " If the good people only knew ! " — 
Horrors of the tenements — A night of sorrow — New revelations — " Is 
that Talmage ? " — An everyday tragedy — The lure of the tempter — The 
illusion dispelled — The two angels — In a den of thieves — Blackmailers 
and social outcasts — The cities to be redeemed 85-98 

DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 

He was wise as well as eloquent — His views on personal influence, dress, 
debt, an aim in life, borrowing trouble, business methods, parental 
duties and kindred topics — Forging a chain of slavery — Business a 
school — The gnat and the camel — Evils of extravagance — Educational 
cramming — Home discipline — A plea for the children — " Remember 
your blessings." 99-1 14 

A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 

Dr. Talmage's autobiographical story of his journeyings in Palestine, Syria, 
Egypt and other Oriental lands — A remarkable and delightful narrative 
told in the form of a diary — The journey from New York to Jerusalem — 
The start — In St. Paul's country — Preaching on Mars' Hill — A meeting 
with royalty — First glimpse of Egypt — Tracing Christ's footsteps — 
Through the Land of Goshen — Arrival at Joppa — On to Jerusalem.. . 1 15-136 

VIII 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

IN THE HOLY CITY 

Holding a service on Mount Calvary — The great temple — Gethsemane — 
Where the ravens fed Eli j alt — A Jordan baptism — Bethlehem visited 
— The tomb of Joseph — At the Good Samaritan Inn — Where Christ 
walked — Jacob's V r r ell — The wine pots of Cana — A sad procession — On 
Lake Galilee — The 'Mount of Transfiguration — An Oriental blizzard — 
Damascus, Beyrout and home 137-174 

" DR. TALMAGE ON PATRIOTISM 

His memorable address at Arlington Heights, on Decoration Day, in 1873 — 
A splendid tribute to the fallen heroes of the Civil War — The Army of 
the Dead — Flowers for the heroes — Missing graves — The heroines of the 
war—" Tell the children " — An invocation to peace 175-183 

HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 

Presidential assassination — Anarchy — Victoria's reign — Abraham Lincoln — 
Easy divorce — Marriage a speculation — Gambling — The liquor ques- 
tion — High license — Impure literature — Labor and capital and the 
Christian solution of the problem 184-198 

IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 

A memorable journey across Europe on "A Mission of Bread " — Dr. Klopsch 
his companion — The good ship lk Leo's " relief cargo for Russia's famine 
sufferers — Reception at St. Petersburg- -Unloading the relief cargo — A 
presentation incident — Enthusiasm of the Russian people — One hundred 
carloads of food — The Americans summoned to the Royal Palace — Pre- 
sented to Czarewitch Nicholas — Dr. Talmage and Czar Alexander III. — 
The Emperor's "Arrow Line " — What famine means — Saving 125,000 
lives — Russia's friendship for the United States 199-224 

THE SILVER JUBILEE 

An unprecedented tribute to the great preacher — The glory of the Tabernacle 
— A memorable assemblage addressed by many eminent divines — Con- 
gratulations from distinguished persons at home and abroad on Dr. 
Talmage's remarkable pastorate — The secret of living on sunshine — 
Hard work, but happy years — Second day of the Jubilee — Honored by 
North and South — Governor McKinley's tribute — A remarkable closing 
scene 225-244 

"RED WINGS" 

The destruction of the last and most beautiful Tabernacle — "A mystery to be 
revealed only in Eternity " — Dr. Talmage's deadly peril — Many narrow 
escapes — Sympathy of press and public — Dr. Talmage's cheerful mes- 
sage — The preacher begins his globe-girdling tour 245-250 

IX 



TABLE OF CONTEXTS 

A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 

Preaching to great audiences in Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India and 
Great Britain — Luncheon with President Dole, of Hawaii — Invited to 
speak in Honolulu — A strange cosmopolitan audience — A delightful 
Australian experience — Preaching in " Ceylon's Isle " through interpret- 
ers — A sermon under a " punkah" in Calcutta — Addressing vast audi- 
ences in Great Britain — The wide world's welcome to the great American 
divine 251 -274 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 

Pastor of the " Church of the Presidents " — A notable opening sermon — Dr. 
Talmage's huge daily mail — An influential ministry — His Washington 
home — Calls from many quarters — Retirement from the Washington 
pastorate — The resignation tendered to Presbytery — Tributes from Dr. 
Talmage's fellow-pastors 275-289 

LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 

In the Scottish Capital — Florence Nightingale visited — A delightful inter- 
view with the famous " Lady of the Lamp " — Gladstone's home visited — 
Preaching in Sweden — " The Land of the Midnight Sun " — Uses of 
darkness — A strange Fourth of July — In beautiful Paris — Glories of 
the great Exposition — Kaiser Wilhelm's Capital — "Augusta, pack the 
trunks ! " — A visit to Vienna — Dr. Talmage's second journey to Russia 
— Welcomed by Czar Nicholas — America's gift remembered — Meets 
the Dowager Empress — Airs. Talmage's impressions of the tour 290-317 

HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 

The last Southern journey — Addressing great audiences in Richmond, Ala- 
con, Charleston and New Orleans — The last sermon he ever preached 
on his native soil- — Enthusiasm of the New Orleans press — A pen pic- 
ture of Talmage as he appeared to Southern, eyes — A memorable 
welcome in Louisiana's capital city , 318-337 

THE LAST OF EARTH 

Dr. Talmage, prostrated in Mexico, returns to Washington to die — The sick 
man watched by a nation — The closing scenes in the great preacher's 
career — Passing away surrounded by his family — Tokens of sympathy — 
Lying amid the flowers — His funeral in Washington — A memorable 
gathering — A wreath from President Roosevelt — Addresses of Rev. 
Drs. Easton, Hamlin, Demarest and Van Dyke — Taken to Brooklyn in 
the McKinley funeral car — The interment in Greenwood — Rev. Dr. 

Suydam's beautiful funeral address at the grave 338-360 

x 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



THE WORLDS TRIBUTE 



A great Talmage memcrial meeting in Brooklyn — A monster audience 
reverent and sympathetic — Addresses by Rev. Drs. Carson, Demarest, 
Cadman, Farrar and Oakes, and by Ira D. Sankey — Testimonials from 
distinguished men in America and Europe read to the audience — Ad- 
mirals, generals, statesmen, authors and divines unite in glowing eulogies 
of the dead — The great preacher's genius extolled and the far-reaching 
influence of his life-work recognized — His Christian Herald associates' 
tribute 361-383 

RECOLLECTIONS OF DR. TALMAGE 

Personal reminiscences of the great preacher — Student days — His early 
ministry — Familiar with the Bible — His favorite studies — Dr. Talmage 
in war times — Later years — " Sending a message to Heaven " — His 
joyful anticipations of the future life — A prophetic invitation 384-393 

THE LESSON OF DR. TALMAGE'S LIFE 

His early career, as revealing the man and prophesying the work he accom- 
plished — Divinely called to his peculiar work — His friendship a rare 
pleasure — His marvelous first sermon — Waking the sleepers — Rebuking 
a slander — His wonderful abilities and how he used them for God's 
glory and the betterment of mankind 394-403 

CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 

An interrupted sermon — Startling his audience — Talmage and McKinley — 
Where Patti was second choice — Angels of the needle — Why he quitted 
the law — An elusive sermon — Talmage and Greeley — The infidel book — 
" I feel like a morning star " — Washington anecdotes — A box of cigars 
— Macmillan's test of orthodoxy, etc., etc 404-415 

DR. TALMAGE IN LITERATURE 

A prolific author, he wrote many books and all were successful — Some of the 
most famous among them — His career in the lecture field — His editorial 
salutatory — Writing as an editor — A pen picture of the man — Tribute 
to Phillips Brooks — His views on journalism — The mission of news- 
papers 417-426 

DR. TALMAGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 

Ministers' diet — Fashionable choirs — The massacre of church music — A 
recipe for poor preaching — The " coughing brigade " — Swallowing a fly 
— A wedding in the clouds — Stay where you're happy — City fools in 
the country — The ill-natured man — My first and only ghost — Putting 
up the stove — Chills and fever vindicated 427-441 






TABLE OF CONTEXTS 

A CLUSTER OF GEMS 

Voices of Nature — The spirit of the flowers — Recognition in heaven — The 
bells of Moscow — Chariots of cloud — Compensation in Heaven — The 
consummation — Celestial music — Cling to the old Bible — Funeral of the 
Flowers — The fading leaf — The glories of Yellownstone — Our National 
resources — The final haven — The costliest song on earth — A glorious 
vacation — Characteristic utterances 443-462 

DR. TALMAGE'S INFLUENCE ON HIS TIMES 

His sermons in rural districts — Used in pastorless churches — In farmhouses 
and barns — A means of grace in needy places — What Dr. Talmage stood 
for — A champion of the Bible — Insisted on the whole Book — Faithful to 
the old Gospel — Defence of morality and the home — An eloquent advocate 
of temperance — Business morality — Fervent patriotism — His glorious op- 
timism — The effect of his ministry on the world 463-467 

DR. TALMAGE'S LOVE OF COUNTRY 

His views on our National blessings — Comparisons between foreign coun- 
tries and our own — The best land for the worker — European burdens — 
Our thrifty nation — Plenty of elbow room — Our vast resources — Our 
full cup of blessings — Reasons for thankfulness as a nation 468-476 

A FILIAL TRIBUTE 

Memorial sermon by the Rev. Frank De Witt Talmage, D.D., son of the Dis- 
tinguished preacher, delivered in the Jefferson Park Presbyterian 
Church, Chicago, April 20, 1902 — His father's personality — Novel ser- 
monic methods — Constantly in harness — His daily life his best sermon — 
The parting scene 477-488 

THE LAST SERMON HE EVER WROTE 

A paean of jubilee and thanksgiving for all the blessings of a long and 
godly life — An autobiograph page of Dr. Talmage's manuscript from 
last sermon he ever wrote 489-497 



xn 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Academy of Music, New York, Great Gospel Meetings at 186 

Arlington, A Great Military Funeral at 174 

Arlington, Tomb of the Unknown Dead 182 

Australian Miners, Dr. Talmage and His Son Frank Among the . . . . 262 

Banks, Rev. Louis A . . 239 

Bedouin of Lake Galilee ........ ^ . 163 

Bedouin of the Desert 163 

Bethlehem, Pilgrims on the March to ............ 39 

Bethlehem, The Silver Star of the Nativity 149 

Boundbrook, N. J., The First Reformed Church 32 

Broadmoor Casino and Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs . . . .191 

Budapest, The Parliament Houses at ... 299 

Burial Spot, Arrival of the Casket at the . . . . . . . . . . ' . 357 

Cadman, Rev. S. P 231 

Calvary, Mount 139 

Capernaum, Ruins of the City of .............. 37 

Carson, D.D., Rev. Dr. . .............. 363 

Carson, Rev. Dr ' . 363 

Casket from the Talmage Home, Removing the . . . 341 

Casket in Position, Placing the 358 

Casket into the Church, Taking the Violet-covered ........ 347 

Catacombs at Rome, A Chamber in the 64 

Central Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn ........... 379 

Charleston, Cotton Palace, ............... 322 

Church of the Covenant, Interior of the 353 

Cook's Monument at Hawaii, Captain 269 

Copenhagen, Denmark, Royal Palace ............ 63 

Corbin, Adj.-Gen. H. C 371 

" Corn Husking Time " 41 

Cortege Arrives at the Church, The ............. 350 

Cronstadt, Dr. Talmage Goes to ..... ■ . 205 

Czar Alexander and Family 213 

Czar, Dr. Tannage's Meeting With the 220 

Damascus, Brass- Workers' Bazaar 35 

Damascus, Oriental Merchants in 164 

David and City Wall, Tower of 162 

Dead Sea, By the 154 

Demarest, D.D., Rev. James 394 

Denmark and His Wife, The Heir Apparent of ■ . ■ 295 

XIII 






ILLUSTRATIONS 

Depew, Hon. Chauncey M 369 

Dewey, Admiral George 376 

Diaz, President of Mexico, General Porfirio 331 

Dixon, Rev. A. C 237 

Dragoman David Jamal 165 

Dresden, The Great Art Gallery in 267 

Easter Day Crowds at the Holy Sepulchre 169 

Edinburgh, Dr. Talmage Speaking at 265 

Editorial Associates in " The Christian Herald " Office, Dr. Talmage and His 416 

Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition, The 303 

Elephant-back, Dr. Talmage on 257 

Elephanta, India, Visited by Dr. Talmage, The Caves of 255 

Fairbanks, Hon. Chas. W 371 

Family Leaving the House for the Church, The 340 

Farrar, D.D., Rev. J. P 231 

Floral Tributes on Dr. Talmage's Grave, The 359 

Fountain at Cana of Galilee, A 160 

Franz Joseph of Austria, Emperor 309 

Friends of the Family Entering the Church 35 1 

Frye, Senator Wm. P 369 

Funeral Cortege Leaving Dr. Talmage's Washington Residence .... 339 

Galilee, On the Margin of the Sea of 54 

Gethsemane, Garden of . 145 

Germany, The Emperor of 305 

Gladstone Family in the Grounds of Hawarden, The 294 

Greece, Olga, Queen of 306 

Greenwood, Crowds Around the Talmage Plot in 355 

Hamlin Arrives, Rev. Dr 348 

Henderson, D. B 369 

Honolulu, The Government House at 256 

Honolulu, The National Palace 254 

Hyde Park, London, Dr. Talmage in 264 

Imperial Carriage Waits, The 212 

Indian Camel-Carriage, Calcutta, Dr. Talmage and His Sons in an . . . 253 

Jacob's Well 143 

Jefferson Park Church 479 

Jericho, Travelers at the Plain of ... 144 

Jerusalem from Mount Scopus 146 

Jerusalem from Near the Damascus Gate . 196 

Jordan, Russian Pilgrims Bathing in the 156 

Jordan, Talmage Baptizing in the 147 

Jubilee Celebration in the Third Brooklyn Tabernacle, The Great .... 228 

XIV 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Kileaua, The Great Crater of 259 

" Leo," Dr. Talmage Blessing the Cargo of the Relief Ship 321 

" Leo," On the Relief S. S 208 

" Leo," Steamship . . . 200 

Long, Secretary of Navy, John D 376 

Mahmal from Cairo to Mecca, Procession of the . .158 

McFarland, Hon. H. B. F 380 

McKinley, President William 234 

Manchester, Dr. Talmage Preaching at 263 

Melbourne, Town Hall Organ, Fifth Largest in the World 270 

Memorial Services in Brooklyn, The Talmage 362 

Mexican Peasant Housewife Making Tortillas 335 

Midnight Sun, Viewing the 297 

Milburn, U. S. Senate, Chaplain 239 

Miles, Gen. Nelson A . 371 

Music Hall and Beer Garden 74 

Nazareth, Group of Children in 155 

New Orleans, Convalescent Home 325 

New Orleans, Outdoor Shoemaker, French Quarter 327 

New Orleans " Waifs' Home " 323 

Nightingale, Florence . 291 

Ocean Grove, Where Dr. Talmage Preached to 10,000 Persons .... 274 

Only a Drunkard 76 

On the Old Hayfield 53 

Organ in the Brooklyn Tabernacle, The Great Jardine 230 

Ovation to the Americans, The 206 

Patriarch, A Modern Palestine 138 

Peasants of the Environs of Gaza Preparing Coffee 140 

Peterhof, Summer Palace of the Czar at . . .218 

Potsdam, The Royal Palace at 308 

Quarantania Mountain 151 

Rachel's Tomb 170 

RadclifTe, Rev. Wallace 380 

Richmond, Va., Academy of Music 336 

Richmond, Y. M. C. A. Building at 319 

Russia and His Family, The Czar of 311 

Russia, Farewell Banquet, . 216 

Russian Imperial Family, Dr. Talmage Meeting the 316 

Russian Officials, Dr. Talmage Addressing 202 

Russian People, Dr. Talmage Salutes the 204 

Russia, Spreading Good News of Arrival of S. S. " Leo " 222 

Russia, Winter Palace 307 

xv 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

St. Petersburg, Going to the Dohma (Town Hall) 20Q 

St. Petersburg, Dr. Talinage " Chaired'' at 210 

Samoa, The King and Queen of 258 

Sankey, Ira D 2$j 

Sherman, Gen. T 234 

Stephanie of Austria, Crown Princess 314 

Stockholm, Sweden, Royal Palace at 2^2 

Suydam, D.D., Rev. J. Howard 384 

Tabernacle After the Fire, The Ruins of the Brooklyn ....... 247 

Tabernacle, First Brooklyn 243 

Tabernacle, Second Brooklyn . 244 

Tabernacle, The Last Brooklyn .............. 226 

Talmage and Daughters, Dr. Goyn . .... 22 

Talmage and Dr. Louis Klopsch ............. 43 

Talmage at 25, T. De Witt 55 

Talmage as a Young Man, T. De Witt . 24 

Talmage, Catharine iS 

Talmage, David 18 

Talmage, D.D., Rev. T. De Witc . . . . 47 

Talmage, Dr. T. De Witt 276 

Talmage's Favorite Portrait, Dr. . 442 

Talmage in His 45th Year, Dr. 55 

Talmage in His 60th Year, Dr. ............. 57 

Talmage in His 65th Year, Dr. . 50 

Talmage, Dr. John Van Nest .............. 20 

Talmage, Mrs 276 

Talmage, Regimental Chaplain 57 

Talmage, The Rev. Frank De Witt 478 

Tea Service, Gold Enameled 223 

Tombs Court, Sunday Morning Cases in the Famous New York .... 82 

Wall Street, the World's Financial Centre 107 

Washington, D. C, The Church of the Covenant 345 

Washington, D. C, The First Presbyterian Church, 283 

Washington, Pall-Bearers Coming from the Talmage Residence .... 343 

Water Terrace in the Czar's Summer Palace at Peterhof, The 312 

Welcome By Count Bobrinskoy, The 207 

Welcoming the Wanderer Home 44 

Wesley's Church in London, Dr. Talmage Addressing a Monster Meeting 

Wilson, Hon. James . 376 

Windsor Castle, England 268 

And thirty-five minor illustrations. 

XVI 




DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 

A SPECIAL COMMISSION — PILLING A NEED OF THE TIMES — THE HUMBLE HOME- 
STEAD SAXON ANCESTRY PURITANS IN EXILE TWO BROTHERS POUNDERS 

OP THE PAMILY SETTLEMENT IN NEW JERSEY A REVIVAL EPISODE A 

GRANDMOTHER^ PRAYERS — PENIEL IN A BARN — A MINISTERING ANGEL — DR. 

TALMAGE'S TRIBUTE TO HIS AUNT THE ALMOND TREE IN BLOSSOM A LIPE- 

LONG STRUGGLE — A TYPICAL AMERICAN LIPE — CHRISTIANITY IN POLITICS — 
A PIOUS MOTHER'S INFLUENCE THE HANDS OP BENEDICTION 



F the greatest of all the prophets of the old dispensation, the simple 
statement is made : " There was a man sent from God." In our modern 
biography we try to account for the prominence of a preacher or 
&* teacher in the less direct way of analyzing his character and talents 
jj/ and trying to find something in his mental equipment which will 
explain his eminence. Probably, if we knew more of the Divine gox- 
ernment of the world, we should discover that the Supreme Being, taking 
account of the condition of the church and the world, and perceiving, as we 
do but dimly, the tendency of the currents 

of thought moving among men, foresees ^~ 

that there will be need of some special ~ !>«» 

message being proclaimed, and especially ~^Bs>i^ -- ji^fS.*-. 

commissions a messenger, whom He pre- " JSBii^ 

pares and equips for the task of delivering 

it. So, while we laboriously explain the >P|n^^^| ilL , 

characteristics which give power to some W^sSfelii 

great teacher, a denizen of the higher _____ 

world may compress the whole explana- r -*~ Sr ~~~ . •-" --. : - 
tion into the pregnant phrase: "There /- 

was a man sent from God." 

THE WORLD'S EXPECTATION 

The wonderful development of the news- 
paper press in the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century furnished an opportunity 
2 




i8 



T. DE WITT TALAIAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



for such a man as Thomas DeWitt Talmage. A man of his special talent 
was pre-eminently needed. The faith of many was growing cold ; vast and 
ever-increasing numbers of men were neglecting the church ; the opportunities 
of making huge fortunes were engrossing their attention ; and the newspaper 
was rapidly becoming the only Bible that the multitude read. With a 
strange fatality, there was increasing on the other hand, a tendency in the 
pulpit to use a theological dialect, that might be called a religious slang — 
a vocabulary of terms that were not in ordinary use in the market, the court 
and the street; so that the plain business man, not being a theological expert, 
failed to understand the sermons he heard. Xot a few staved awav from 




DAVID TALMAGE CATHARINE TALMAGE 

Father and Mother of the Great Preacher 

church, while those who continued to go from a sense of duty or the force 
of habit, came away with the feeling of the Northern farmer, who said : 

" I niver knawd what he meand, but I thowt he had summat to say 
An' I thowt he said what he owt to ha said, an' I corned away." 

The supreme need of the hour was for a man who could utter the Gospel 



understand it; in a form, too, so vigorous that, when stripped of the charm of 
voice and manner, and presented in cold type, people would read it. No man 



DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 19 

had ever appeared with those qualifications, but there was urgent need for one, 
and there are thousands of people in both hemispheres who are profoundly thank- 
ful that in the emergency, " There was a man sent from God." 

TALMAGE'S HUMBLE BIRTH 

One of the last places where we could have expected to find a man with 
qualifications so rare, would be a humble cottage farm in a country village; yet 
it was in such a home that the great preacher, who was destined to hold spell- 
bound millions of voluntary auditors, week after week, through many years, 
first saw the light. Eleven children, six boys and five girls, had already been 
born to David Talmage and Catharine his wife, when in their home at Bound- 
brook, N. J., on January 7, 1832, the boy was born, to whom they gave the 
name, now familiar as household words in millions of homes in all lands, of 
Thomas DeWitt. 

After Dr. Talmage became famous, a search was made by genealogists, 
who discovered that the family had an ancestral line by no means as inconspicu- 
ous as the humble circumstances of his father, the hard-working farmer, would 
indicate. The original spelling of the name was Tollmack, which meant in Saxon 
phraseology, the ringing or tolling of a bell. As the language changed under 
Norman influence, the spelling of the name changed to Tollemache. But the 
family clung to its Saxon origin, and the proud boast of long pedigree became 
embodied in a couplet still known to every member of the Talmage house. 
It ran: 

" Before the Normans into England came, 
Bentley was my seat and Tollemache was my name." 

Bentley is a small town in the English county of Suffolk, where the present 
head of the family, William Frederick, Baron Tollemache, still resides. 

HIS REVOLUTIONARY ANCESTORS 

The American branch of the family traces its ancestry to two young men 
who, in the troublous times of Charles L, King of England, became Puritans 
and left the old country, as did many other God-fearing men, to found homes in 
a new land where they could worship God according to their consciences. They 
came over in 1630 on a ship named The Plough, on the passenger list of which 
their names were written Enos and Thomas Tallmadge. Enos, after spending 
some time with his brother at Salem, Mass., settled at East Hampton, Long- 
Island, N. Y. He had four sons and two daughters. Daniel, one of the sons, 
removed to Elizabethtown, N. J. His family consisted of two sons and a 
daughter. One of the sons, named Thomas, settled at New Brunswick, where 
he died in 1790, and was buried in the graveyard of the Presbyterian Church. 
He abbreviated the family name to its present form. He was the father of eight 



20 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



children, the eldest surviving son, Thomas, being Dr. Talmage's grandfather. 
Thomas Talmage had thirteen children, of whom David, Dr. Talmage's father, 
was the fourth. The family was represented in the Revolution by Thomas 
Talmage, whose name appears as sergeant on the rolls of the New Jersey militia. 

On the mother's side, too, there 
was no lack of patriotism. Her 
father, Peter Van Ness, and both 
her grandfathers, John Brocaw and 
Gavin McCoy, were all in Wash- 
ington's army, and the former — 
John Brocaw — was killed in the 
battle of Germantown, October 4, 
1777- 

A REVIVAL EPISODE 

The religious strain in the fam- 
ily character, which brought the 
two brothers to America in 1630, 
H| manifested itself in later genera- 

: ^^^1 HL tions. Dr. Talmage used to relate, 

Rk [fet te r . for the encouragement of praying 

HHj jk parents, that his grandmother, while 

attending meetings of a famous 
Evangelist, became intensely anxious 
for the conversion of her children. 
" One day," he said, " as they were 
starting to a country party their 
mother told them of her desire and 
said, ' Go and have a good time ; 
but while you are gone I want you 
to know I am praying for you, and 
will do nothing but pray for you 
until you get back/ They w T ent off to the gay entertainment. They did not 
enjoy it much because they thought all the time of the fact that their mother 
was praying for them. The evening passed. The children returned. The 
next day my grandparents heard sobbing and crying in their daughter's room, 
and they went in and found her praying for the salvation of God, and she said : 
' I wish you would go to the barn and to the wagon house, for Jehiel and 
David (her brothers) are under conviction of sin.' My grandparents went to 
the barn, and Jehiel, who afterward became a useful minister of the Gospel, 
was imploring the mercy of God, and then having first knelt with him and com- 
mended his soul to Christ, they went to the wagon house, and there was David 
crying for the salvation of his soul — David, who afterward became my father. 




JOHN VAN NEST TALMAGE 



DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 21 

" The whole family was swept into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. David 
could not keep the story to himself, and he crossed the fields to a farmhouse 
and told one to whom he had been affianced the story of his own salvation, and 
she yielded her heart to God. It was David and Catharine, and they stood up 
in the village church together a few weeks after — for the story of the converted 
household went all through the neighborhood. In a few weeks two hundred 
souls stood up in the plain meeting-house at Somerville to profess faith in Christ, 
among them David and Catharine, afterward my parents.'' 

A MINISTERING ANGEL 

Dr. Talmage's aunt Phoebe, to whom he refers in the above incident, always 
occupied a tender and reverent place in his memory. In one of his sermons he 
paid the following eloquent tribute to her character : 

" The patron saint of almost every family circle is some unmarried woman, 
and among all the families of cousins she moves around, and her coming in 
each house is the morning, and her going away is the night. In my large circle 
of kindred, perhaps twenty families in all, it was an Aunt Phoebe. Paul gave 
a letter of introduction to one whom he calls ' Phcebe, our sister,' as she went up 
from Cenchrea to Rome, commending her for her kindness and Christian serv- 
ice, and imploring for her all courtesies. I think Aunt Phoebe was named after 
her. AYas there a sickness in any of the households, she was there ready to sit 
up and count out the drops of medicine. Was there a marriage, she helped 
deck the bride for the altar. Was there a new soul incarnated, she was there 
to rejoice at the nativity. Was there a sore bereavement, she was there to 
console. The children rushed out at her first appearance, crying, ' Here 
comes Aunt Phoebe,' and but for parental interference they would have pulled 
her down with their caresses — for she was not very strong, and many severe 
illnesses had given her enough glimpses of the next world to make her heavenly- 
minded. 

" Her table was loaded up with Baxter's Saints' Rest, Doddridge's Rise and 
Progress, and Jay's Morning and Evening Exercises, and John Bunyan's Pil- 
grim's Progress, and like books, which have fitted out whole generations for the 
heaven upon which they have already entered. If you would know how her 
presence would soothe an anxiety or lift a burden or cheer a sorrow or leave 
a blessing on every room in the house, ask any of the Talmages. 

AUNT PHOEBE'S LAST VISIT 

" She had tarried at her early home, taking care of an invalid father, until 
the bloom of life had somewhat faded; but she could interest the young folks 
with some three or four tender passages in her own history, so that we all knew 
that it was not through lack of opportunity that she was not the queen of one 
household, instead of being a benediction on a whole circle of households, 



22 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



" She could pray, or sing ' Rock of Ages,' for any sick pauper who asked 
her. As she got older, there were days when she was a little sharp, but for 
the most part Auntie was a sunbeam — just the one for Christmas eve. She 
knew better than any one else how to fix things. Her every prayer, as God 
heard it, was full of everybody who had trouble. The brightest things in all 
the house dropped from her fingers. She had peculiar notions, but the grandest 
notion she ever had was to make you happy. She dressed well — Auntie always 
dressed well ; but her highest adornment was that of a meek and quiet spirit, 
which, in the sight of God, is of great price. 

" At about seventy years of age she made her last visit to my house, and 
when she sat in my Philadelphia church I was more embarrassed at her presence 
than by all the audience, because I felt that in religion I had got no further 
than the ABC, while she had learned the whole alphabet, and for many years 
had finished the Y and Z. When she went out of this life into the next, what 




DR. GOYN TALMAGE AND DAUGHTERS 



a shout there must have been in heaven, from the front door clear up to the back 
seat in the highest gallery ! I saw the other dav in the village cemetery of Somer- 
ville, N. J., her resting-place, the tombstone having on it the words which, thirty 
years ago she told me she would like to have inscribed there, namely: 'The 
Morning Cometh.' 

" Had she a mission in the world ? Certainly. As much as Caroline Her- 
schel, first amanuensis for her illustrious brother, and then his assistant in astro- 
nomical calculations, and then discovering worlds for herself, dying at ninety- 
eight years of age, still busy with the stars till she sped beyond them : as much 
as had Florence Nightingale, the nurse of the Crimea: or Grace Darling, the 
oarswoman of the Eong Stone Eighthouse ; or Mary Lyon, the teacher of Mount 



DR. TALM AGE'S ANCESTRY 23 

Holyoke Female Seminary; or Hannah More, the Christian authoress of Eng- 
land; or Dorothea Dix, the angel of mercy for the insane; or Anna Etheridge, 
among the wounded of Blackburn's Fort ; or Margaret Breckenridge, at Vicks- 
burg; or Mary Shelton, distributing roses and grapes and cologne in Western 
hospital; or thousands of other glorious women like them, who never took the 
marriage sacrament." 

CHRISTIAN PARENTAGE 

A noble Christian couple were David and Catharine Talmage, who, as 
above described, stood among the two hundred converts to profess their faith. 
To the end of his life their distinguished son, speaking of them, found his 
voice break, and his eyes dimmed with tears. His allusions to them in his ser- 
mons were frequent and always full of pathos. They represented to him the 
heroic and stalwart side of Christianity. The father, strong in principle, self- 
denying, industrious, conscientious ; the mother, tender, affectionate, kindly and 
helpful, not only in her own home, but among her neighbors. It must have 
been a hard struggle to maintain and educate the twelve children, but the father 
was true to his duty, ceaseless in his industry, and he was loyally helped in the 
home by his devoted wife. Preaching shortly after his father's death, Dr. Talmage 
thus described his character: 

" The child of his old age, I come to pay a humble tribute to him who, in 
the hour of my birth, took me into his watchful care, and whose parental faith- 
fulness, combined w T ith that of my mother, was the means of bringing my erring 
feet to the Cross, and kindling. in my soul anticipation of immortal blessedness. 
If I failed to speak, methinks the old family Bible, that I brought home with 
me, would rebuke my silence, and the very walls of my youthful home would 
tell the story of my ingratitude. I must speak, though it be with broken utter- 
ance, and in terms which may seem too strong for those who never had an oppor- 
tunity of gathering the fruit of this luxuriant almond-tree. 

RECOLLECTIONS OF HIS FATHER. 

" In my father's old age was to be seen the beauty of a cheerful spirit. I 
never remember to have heard him make a gloomy expression. This was not 
because he had no perception of the pollutions of society. He abhorred any- 
thing like impurity, or fraud, or double-dealing. He never failed to lift up his 
voice against sin, when he saw it. He was terrible in his indignation against 
wrong, and had an iron grip for the throat of him who trampled on the help- 
less. Better meet a lion robbed of her whelps than him, if you had been stealing 
the bread from the mouth of the fatherless. It required all the placidity of my 
mother's voice to calm him when once the mountain storm of his righteous wrath 
was in full blast ; while as for himself, he would submit to more impositions, 
and say nothing, than any man I ever knew, 




T. D£ WITT TAI.MAGK AT 25 
From a Photograph Hitherto Unpublished 



DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 25 

" But, while sensitive to the evils of society, he felt confident that all would 
be righted. When he prayed, you could hear in the very tones of his voice the 
expectation that Christ Jesus would utterly demolish all iniquity, and fill the 
earth with his glory. This Christian man was not a misanthrope, did not think 
that everything was going to ruin, considered the world a very good place to 
live in. He never sat moping or despondent, but took things as they were, 
knowing that God could and would make them better. When the heaviest surge 
of calamity came upon him, he met it with as cheerful a countenance as ever 
a bather at the beach met the incoming Atlantic, rising up on the other side of 
the wave stronger than when it smote him. 

THE OLD CHEERFUL TIMES 

" Without ever being charged with frivolity, he sang and whistled and 
laughed. He knew about all the cheerful tunes that were ever printed in old 
' New Brunswick Collection,' and the ' Shumway,' and the sweetest melodies 
that Thomas Hastings ever composed. I think that every pillar in the Somer- 
ville and Boundbrook churches knew his happy voice. He took the pitch of 
sacred song on Sabbath morning, and lost it not through all the week. I have 
heard him sing when plowing amid the aggravations of ' new ground,' serving 
writs, examining deeds, going to arrest criminals, in the house and by the way, 
at the barn and in the street. 

" He was ready at proper times for all kinds of innocent amusement. He 
often felt a merriment that not only touched the lips, but played upon every 
fibre of the body, and rolled down into the very depths of his soul with long 
reverberations. No one that I ever knew understood more fully the science of 
a good laugh. He was not only quick to recognize hilarity when created by 
others, but was always ready to do his share toward making it. Before extreme 
old age, he could outrun and outleap any of his children. He did not hide his 
satisfaction at having outwalked some one who boasted of his pedestrianism, or 
at having been able to swing the scvthe after all the rest of the harvesters had 
dropped from exhaustion, or at having, in legislative hall, tripped up some 
villainous scheme for robbing the public treasury. We never had our ears boxed, 
as some children I wot of, for the sin of being happy. In long winter nights, 
it was hard to tell who enjoyed sportfulness the better, the children who romped 
the floor, or the parents who, with lighted countenance, looked at them. Great 
indulgence and leniency characterized his family rule, but the remembrance of 
at least one correction more emphatic than pleasing proves that he was not like 
Eli of old, who had wayward sons and restrained them not. In the multitude 
of his witticisms there were no flings at religion, no caricatures of good men, no 
trifling with the things of eternity. His laughter was not the ' crackling of 
thorns under a pot,' but the merry heart that doeth good like a medicine. For 
this all the children in the community knew him ; and to the last day of his walk- 
ing out ? when they saw him coming down the lane, shouted, ' Here comes grand- 



26 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

father ! ' No gall, no acerbity, no hypercriticism. If there was a bright side to 
anything, he always saw it; and his name, in all the places where he dwelt, will 
long be a synonym for exhilaration of spirit. 

" No doubt, constitutional structure had much to do with this cheerful- 
ness. He had, by a life of sobriety, preserved his freshness and vigor. You 
know that good habits are better than speaking tubes to the ear, better than 
a staff to the hand, better than lozenges to the throat, better than warm baths 
to the feet, better than bitters to the stomach. 

A FATHER'S CARES 

" Let not this account of his cheerfulness give you the idea that he never 
had any trouble. Few men have so serious and overwhelming a life-struggle as 
he had. He went out into the world without means, and with no educational 
opportunity, save that which was afforded him in the winter months, in an old, 
dilapidated schoolhouse, from instructors whose chief work was' to collect their 
own salary. More than once he came to his last dollar; but right behind that 
last dollar he found Him who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and out of 
the palm of whose hand all the fowls of heaven peck their food, and who hath 
given to each one of his disciples a warranty deed for the whole universe in the 
words, ' All are yours.' 

" The path that led him through financial straits prepared him also for sore 
bereavements. The infant of days was smitten, and he laid it into the river of 
death with as much confidence as infant Moses was laid in the ark on the Nile. 
knowing that soon from the royal palace a shining One would come to fetch it. 
In an island of the sea, among strangers, almost unattended, death came to a 
beloved son ; and though I remember the darkness that dropped on the house- 
hold when the black-sealed letter was opened, I remember also the utterances 
of Christian submission. Another, bearing his own name, just on the threshold 
of manhood, his heart beating high with hope, falls into the dust; but above the 
cries of early widowhood and the desolation of that dark day I hear the patriarch's 
prayer commending children and children's children to the divine sympathy. 

PIETY IN THE PATERNAL HOME 

" In the neighborhood where we lived, for years he held a devotional meet- 
ing. Oftentimes the only praying man present before a handful of attendants, 
he would give out the hymn, read the lines, conduct the music, and pray. Then 
read the Scriptures, and pray again. Then lead forth in the Doxology with an 
enthusiasm as if there were a thousand people present, and all the church mem- 
bers had been doing their duty. He went forth visiting the sick, burying the 
dead, collecting alms for the poor, inviting the ministers of religion to his house- 
hold, in which there was, as in the house of Shunem, a little room over the 
wall, with bed and candlestick for any passing Elisha. He never shuddered at 



DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 27 

the sight of a subscription-paper, and not a single great cause of benevolence has 
arisen within the last half century which he did not bless with his beneficence. 
Oh ! this was not a barren almond-tree that blossomed. His charity was not 
like the bursting of the bud. of a famous tree in the South, that fills the whole 
forest with its racket, nor was it a clumsy thing, like the fruit in some tropical 
clime, that crashes down, almost knocking the life out of those who gather it, 
for in his case the right hand knew not what the left hand did. 

BELOVED BY THE CHURCHES 

" The churches of God, in whose service he toiled, have arisen as one man 
to declare his faithfulness and to mourn their loss. He stood in the front of 
the holy war, and the courage which never trembled or winced in the presence 
of temporal danger induced him to dare all things for God. In church mat- 
ters he was not afraid to be shot at. Ordained, not by the laying on of human 
hands, but by the imposition of a Saviour's love, he preached by his life, in 
official " position, and legislative hall, and commercial circles, a practical Chris- 
tianity. 

" He showed that there was such a thing as honesty in politics. He slan- 
dered no party, stuffed no ballot-box, forged no naturalization papers, intoxi- 
cated no voters, told no lies, surrendered no principle, countenanced no dema- 
gogism. He called things by their right names ; and what others styled prevari- 
cation, misstatement, or hyperbole, he called a lie. Though he was far from 
being undecided in his views, and never professed neutrality, or had any con- 
sort with those miserable men who boast how well they can walk on both sides 
of a dividing-line and be on neither, yet even in the excitements of election can- 
vass, when his name was hotly discussed in public journals, I do not think his 
integrity was ever assaulted. 

THE MORNING BIBLE CHAPTER 

" Starting every morning with a chapter of the Bible, and his whole family 
around him on their knees, he forgot not, in the excitements of the world, that 
he had a God to serve and a heaven to win. The morning prayer came up on 
one side of the day, and the evening prayer on the other side, and joined each 
other in an arch above his head, under the shadow of which he walked all the 
day. . The Sabbath worship extended into Monday's conversation and Tuesday's 
bargain and Wednesday's mirth fulness and Thursday's controversy and Friday's 
sociality and Saturday's calculation. 

" Through how many thrilling scenes he had passed ! He stood, at Morris- 
town, in the choir that chanted when George Washington was buried ; talked 
with young men whose fathers he had held on his knee; watched the progress 
of John Adams' administration; denounced, at the time, Aaron Burr's infamy; 
heard the guns that celebrated the New Orleans victory; voted against Jackson, 
but lived long enough to wish we had another just like him; remembered when 



28 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

the first steamer struck the North River with its wheel-buckets; flushed with 
excitement in the time of national banks and sub-treasury; was startled at the 
birth of telegraphy; saw the United States grow from a speck on the world's 
map till all nations dip their flags at our passing merchantmen, and our ' national 
airs ' have been heard on the steeps of the Himalayas ; was born while the Revo- 
lutionary cannon were coming home from Yorktown, and lived to hear the 
tramp of troops returning from the war of the great Rebellion ; lived to speak 
the names of eighty descendants — children, grandchildren and great-grandchil- 
dren. Nearly all his contemporaries gone! Aged Wilberforce said that sailors 
drink to ' friends astern ' until half way over the sea ; and then drink to ' friends 
ahead.' With my father it had for a long time been ' friends ahead.' Long 
and varied pilgrimage ! Nothing but sovereign grace could have kept him true, 
earnest and useful and Christian through so many exciting scenes. 

A CLOSING TRIBUTE TO HIS FATHER. 

" He worked unweariedly from the sunrise of youth to the sunset of old 
age, and then in the sweet nightfall of death, lighted by the starry promises. 
went home, taking his sheaves with him. Mounting from earthly to heavenly 
service, I doubt not there were a great multitude that thronged heaven's gate 
to hail him into the skies — those whose sorrows he had appeased, whose bur- 
dens he had lifted, whose guilty souls he had pointed to a pardoning God, whose 
dying moments he had cheered, whose ascending spirits he had helped up on 
the wings of sacred music. I should like to have heard that long, loud, trium- 
phant shout of heaven's welcome. I think that the harps throbbed with another 
thrill, and the hills quaked with a mightier hallelujah. Hail, ransomed soul! 
thy race run — thy toil ended. Hail to the coronation ! 

" The day for burial came. An autumnal Sabbath was let down clear from 
heaven. At the first gush of the dawn, we said, ' This is just the appropriate 
day for a Christian to be buried ! ' Fading leaf indeed under foot told of the 
decaying body, but streaming sunshine spoke of resurrection joy. They came 
tottering on their staffs — old comrades who, in eighteen hundred and twelve, 
had marched beside him, drilling in the field, ready for heroic strife. They came 
— the poor whose rent he had paid to keep their children from the blasts of 
winter. They came — the erring men whom he had bailed out of prison. They 
came — the children who had watched his step, and played with his cane, and 
had often wondered what new attraction grandfather would unfold from his 
deep pockets. They came — the ministers of religion who had sat with him in 
church courts, and planned for the advancement of religion. 

" Passing along the roads where he had often gone, and by the birthplace 
of most of his children, we laid him down to rest, just as the sun was setting 
in the country graveyard, close beside her with whom for more than half a 
century he had walked, and prayed, and sung, and counseled." 



DR. TALMAGE'S ANCESTRY 29 

Dr. Talmage's memories of his mother were tender and reverential in the 
extreme. Among many references to her in his sermons is the following : 

HIS DEVOTED MOTHER. 

" Through a long life of vicissitude she lived harmlessly and usefully, and 
came to her end in peace. No child of want ever came to her door and was 
turned empty away. No one in sorrow came to her but was comforted. No 
one asked her the way to be saved, but she pointed him to the Cross. When 
the angel of life came to a neighbor's dwelling, she was there to rejoice at the 
starting of another immortal spirit. When the angel of death came to a neigh- 
bor's dwelling, she was there to robe the departed for burial. We had often 
heard her, when leading family prayers in the absence of my father, say, ' O 
Lord, I ask not for my children wealth or honor, but I do ask that they all may 
be the subjects of thy converting grace.' Her eleven children brought into the 
kingdom of God, she had but one more wish, and that was that she might see 
her long-absent missionary son, and when the ship from China anchored in New 
York harbor, and the long-absent one passed over the threshold of his paternal 
home, she said, ' Now, Lord, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
eyes have seen thy salvation.' The- prayer was soon answered. 

THE BEAUTY OF DEATH 

" It was an autumnal day when we gathered from afar, and found only the 
house from which the soul had fled forever. She looked very natural, the hands 
very much as when they were employed with kindness for her children. What- 
ever else we forget, we never forget the look of mother's hands. As we stood 
there by the casket we could not help say, ' Doesn't she look beautiful ? ' It was 
a cloudless day when, with heavy hearts, we carried her out to the last resting- 
place. The withered leaves crumbled under hoof and wheel as we passed, and 
the sun shone on the Raritan river until it looked like fire. But more calm and 
beautiful and radiant was the setting sun of that aged pilgrim's life. No more 
toil, no more tears, no more sickness, no more death, dear mother! beautiful 
mother ! ' Sweet is the slumber beneath the sod while the pure spirit rests 
with God.' I need not go back and show you Zenpbia, Semiramis or Isabella, 
or even the women of Shunem, as wonders of womanly excellence or great- 
ness, when this moment, I point to your own picture gallery of memory, and 
show you the one face that you remember so well, and arouse all your holy 
reminiscences, and start you in new consecration to God by the pronunciation 
of that tender, beautiful, glorious word — ' mother.' " 

Who can tell how potent was the influence exercised by this noble Chris- 
tian pair on the mind of that son who was to become by divine appointment 
and the common consent of millions of souls the most influential religious teacher 
of modern times? Dr. Talmage himself, as the following passage from one 



30 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



of his sermons preached long afterwards shows, was fully conscious of its force : 
" Now you do not see any hands outstretched toward me, and yet there 
are hands on my brow and hands on both my shoulders. They are hands of 
parental benediction. It is quite a good many years ago now since we folded 
those hands as they began the last sleep on the banks of the Raritan, in the 
village cemetery; but those hands are stretched out toward me to-night, and 
they are just as warm and they are just as gentle as when I sat at their knee 
at five years of age. And I shall never shake off those hands. I do not want 
to. They have helped me so much a thousand times already, and I do not 
expect to have a trouble or a trial between this and my grave where those 
hands will not help me. Theirs was not a very splendid home, as the world 
calls it ; but we had a family Bible there, well worn by tender perusal : and there 
was a family altar there, where we knelt morning and night ; and there was 
a holy Sabbath there ; and stretched in a straight line, or hung in loops or 
festoons, there was a scarlet line in the window. Oh, the tender, precious, 
blessed memory of a Christian home ! Is that the impression you are making 
upon your children? When you are dead — and it will not be long before vou 
are — when you are dead, will your child say, ' If there ever was a good Chris- 
tian father, mine was one? If there ever was a good Christian mother, mine 
was one ? ' Will they say that after you are dead ? Standing some Sabbath 
night in church preaching the glorious Gospel, as I am trying to do, will 
they tell the people in that day how there are hands of benediction on their 
brow and hands of parental benediction on both their shoulders ? " 




W l * I 



m 




BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 

LOVE OF COUNTRY LIFE — THE OLD HOMESTEAD — A GROUP OF NOTABLE SONS AND 
DAUGHTERS — THE MISSIONARY SON — A TEST OF CONSECRATION — DISTIN- 
GUISHED SERVICE IN CHINA — A VALUED PASTOR IN THE HOME FIELD — THE 
COST OF SENDING A BOY TO COLLEGE — HOME ECONOMIES VIVIDLY PORTRAYED — 
THE YOUNGEST MEMBER OF THE FAMILY — THE OLD CRADLE — FARM PETS — THE 
LAST DAY IN THE OLD HOME 



^HE home of his boyhood! How deep and vivid was the impression it 
made on Dr. Talmage's memory ! In the course of his life he traveled 
through all our States and Territories, his keen eye and alert attention 
taking in the details of every scene ; he visited many lands, staying in the 
magnificent cities of the Old World and viewing with strong emotion his- 
toric places and spectacles of natural grandeur ; he entered royal palaces 
and the castles of noble families ; he witnessed wonderful pageants in European 
and Oriental countries; but none of these ever effaced from his memory the 
picture of that humble farmhouse at Boundbrook and the fields and roads 
around it. His face would kindle with loving emotion as he described that scene, 
and he delighted to talk of the boyhood fishing and the work on the farm in which 
he took a boy's part. Young men from the country, sitting in the Brooklyn Tab- 
ernacle were thrilled by the vivid pictures of the ploughing, the harvesting, the 
social celebrations, the country meeting-house and all the occupations of the farm, 
every detail of which he could sketch with photographic fidelity. 

STIRRING THE MEMORY 

Many a young man whose life was being passed in lawyers' or merchants' 
offices, in the bank or the exchange, whose mind was dwelling on the ledgers, or 
the teller's desk, lost sight, as he listened, of the preacher and the crowd around 
him and the walls of the sanctuary, and saw instead the old homestead and the 
peaceful country scenes which he had almost forgotten. Many a family group 
in a distant village was gladdened by a letter from one long silent, who had 
been stirred up to write by a few impressive words uttered at the Tabernacle. 
Many a dissipated life was cleansed by the sharp contrast that was presented 
between the scenes of country purity and godliness and the moral mire and filth 

3 1 



32 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



of the city dive. " It is all true," the hearer would say, " my boyhood home 
was just like that," and he would hang his head in shame when, as if personally 
addressing him, the preacher asked : " Young man, where were you last night? 
Have you forgotten the obligations of that home where your mother and sisters 
and your aged father are?" 

Amid all the triumphs of his manhood, through all the adulation that was 
lavished on him, in spite of the spectacle of eager throngs struggling to enter 




the: first reformed church, boundbrook, n. j. 

In Which Dr. Talmage Made His Public Confession of Faith 

any building in which he was announced to preach, and though he was conscious 
of the millions who read his sermons week by week, the old home, with the father 
and mother at the head and the brothers and sisters who were his companions, 



BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 33 

was the picture that to the last was clearest in his mind, on which he dwelt with 
tender, reverent affection. " Some time ago," he said in a thrilling discourse, 
" in an express train, I shot past that old homestead. I looked out of the window, 
and tried to peer through the darkness. While I was doing so, one of ury old 
schoolmates, whom I had not seen for many years, tapped me on the shoulder, 
and said : ' DeWitt, I see you are looking out at the scenes of your boyhood.' 
' Oh, yes,' I replied ' I was looking out at the old place where my mother lived, 
and died.' 

" That night, in the cars, the whole scene came back to me. There was the 
country home. There was the noonday table. There were the children on either 
side of the table, most of them gone never to come back. At one end of the table 
my father, with a smile that never left his countenance even when he lay in his 
coffin. It was an eighty-six years' smile — not the smile of inanition, but of 
Christian courage and of Christian hope. At the other end of the table was a 
beautiful, benignant, hard-working, aged Christian housekeeper, my mother. 

" She worked very hard, and when we would come in from summer play, and 
sit down at the table at noon, I remember how she used to come in with beads of 
perspiration along the line of gray hair, and how sometimes she would sit down 
at the table, and put her head against her wrinkled hand and say : ' Well, the 
fact is, I'm too tired to eat.' Long after she might have delegated this duty to 
others, she would not be satisfied unless she attended to the matter herself. In 
fact, \ve all preferred to have her do so, for somehow things tasted better when 
she prepared them. She was very tired. I am glad she has so good a place to 
rest in. ' Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord ; they rest from their labors, 
and their works do follow them.' " 

Here is one of his exquisite pictures of farm life from which he drew, as 
he delighted to do, a comforting, cheering idea of the heavenly home : 

" How vividly to all those of us who were born in the country comes the 

remembrance of husking time. We waited for it as for a gala day of the year. 

It was called . „•„ wjn 

A FROLIC 

The trees having for the most part shed their foliage, the farmers waded through 
the fallen leaves and came through the keen morning air to the gleeful company. 
The frosts which had silvered everything during the night, began to melt off ®f 
the top of the corn shocks. While the farmers were waiting for others, they 
stood blowing their breath through their fingers, or threshing their arms around 
their body to keep up warmth of circulation. < 

" Roaring mirth greeted the late farmer as he crawled over the fence. Joke 
and repartee and rustic salutation abounded. All ready, now ! The men take 
hold the shock of corn and hurl it prostrate, while the moles and mice which have 
secreted themselves there for warmth attempt escape. The withe of straw is 
unwound from the corn shock, and the stalks, heavy with the wealth of grain, are 
rolled into two bundles, between which the husker sits down. The husking peg 



34 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

is thrust in until it strikes the corn, and then the fingers rip off the sheathing of 
the ear, and there is a crack as the root of the corn is snapped off from the husk, 
and the grain, disimprisoned, is hurled up into the sunlight. 

" The air is so tonic, the work is so very exhilarating, the company is so blithe, 
that some laugh, and some shout, and some sing, and some banter, and some 
tease a neighbor for a romantic ride along the edge of the woods in an eventide, 
in a carriage that holds but two, and some prophesy as to the number of bushels 
to the field, and others go into competition as to which shall rirle the most corn 
shocks before sundown. 

" After a while, the dinner horn sounds from the farmhouse, and the table 
is surrounded by a group of jolly and hungry men. From all the pantries and 
the cellars and the perches of fowl on the place the richest dainties come, and 
there is carnival and neighborhood reunion, and a scene which fills our memory, 
part with smiles but more with tears, as we remember that the farm belongs 
now to other owners, and other hands gather in the fields, and many of those who 
mingled in that merry husking scene have themselves been reaped ' like as a 
shock of corn cometh in in his season.' 

" You remember, also, that in the time of husking it was 

A NEIGHBORHOOD REUNION 

By the great fireplace in the winter, the fires roaring around the glorified back 
logs on an old-fashioned hearth, of which the modern stoves and registers are 
only the degenerate descendants, the farmers used to gather and spend the evening. 
and there would be much sociality ; but it was not anything like the joy of the 
husking time, for then all the farmers came, and they came in the very best 
humor, and they came from beyond the meadow, and they came from beyond the 
brook, and they came from regions two and three miles around. Good spirit 
reigned supreme, and there were great handshakings, and there was carnival, and 
there was the recital of the brightest experiences in all their lives, and there was 
a neighborhood reunion the memory of which makes all the nerves of my body 
tremble with emotion as the strings of a harp when the fingers of the player have 
swept the chords. 

" I remember that in the husking time there was great equality of feeling 
among the neighbors. There at one corn-shock a farmer would be at work who 
owned two hundred acres of ground. The man whom he was talking with at the 
next corn-shock owned but thirty acres of ground, and perhaps all that covered 
bv a mortgage. That evening, at the close of the husking day. one man drove 
home a roan span so frisky, so full of life they got their feet over the traces. 
The other man walked home. Great difference in education, great difference in 
worldly means: but I noticed at the husking time they all seemed to enjoy each 
other's society. They did not ask any man how much property he owned or what 
his education had been. They all seemed to be happy together in those good 
times. 



BOYHOOD REMIXSCEXCES 



35 



" And so it will be in Heaven. Our Father will gather his children around 
Him, and the neighbors will come in, and the past will be rehearsed. And some 
one will tell of victory and we will all celebrate it. And some one will tell of 
great struggle and we will all praise the grace that fetched him out of it. And 
some one will say, ' Here is my old father that I put away with heartbreak, just 




BRASS-WORKKR S BAZAAR, DAMASCUS 



look at him, he is as young as any of us ! ' And some one will say, ' Here is 
my darling child that I buried in Greenwood and all the after years of my life 
were shadowed with desolation — just look at her! She doesn't seem as if she 
had been sick a minute.' Great sociality. Great neighborhood kindness. 

" What though John Milton sit down on one side and John Howard sit down 
on the other side? No embarrassment. What though Charlotte Elizabeth sit 



36 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

down on one side and Hannah More sit down on the other side? No embarrass- 
ment. A monarch yourself, why be embarrassed among monarchs? A songster 
yourself, why be embarrassed amid glorified songsters? Go in and dine. 

" All the shocks of corn coming in in their season. Not one among all 
of you having died too soon or having died too late, or having died at hap- 
hazard. Planted at just the right time. Ploughed at just the right time. Cut 
down at just the right time. Husked at just the right time. Garnered at jus 1 ; 
the right time. Coming in in your season." 

Of the twelve children born to that grand old couple, only one still survives — 
a daughter now seventy-eight years of age. Of the others, James, the eldest 
son, after long and faithful service in the ministry, died in 1879. A 'an Nest, the 
second son, had scarcely begun a promising business career, when he was sud- 
denly stricken down while on a visit to the West Indies and passed away. Dr. Tal- 
mage often referred to the scene he well remembered, of the arrival at the New- 
Jersey home of the black bordered letter containing the tidings of the death, and 
of the bereaved father and mother turning to the Book of books for consolation 
in their sorrow. It was an added touch of sadness that the beloved form was 
buried as that of an outcast on the seabeach, for being a Protestant, the city 
cemetery was closed against him. Another gap was made in the family circle by 
the death in her girlhood of the third daughter, Maria. Her two elder sisters 
had married and had left the parental home, as had also Daniel, the third son, 
who was making an honorable name in commercial life in a distant city. 

The fourth son, John Van Nest, like his eldest brother, James, had evinced 
piety and talent in so marked a degree, that his Christian parents gladly yielded 
to his wish and the advice of his friends that he prepare for the ministry. At 
Rutgers College, to which he w r as sent, his success was phenomenal. His grad- 
uation was one of those scenes of triumph, which his youngest brother DeWitt, 
then only ten years of age, recalled with satisfaction in the joy that it brought 
to the father and mother who witnessed it. The most unstinted praise was given 
to the young graduate by his tutors, who spoke with pride of his attainments, 
referring especially to his acquirements in Greek and Hebrew and modern lan- 
guages. His special course in theology occupied three years at New Brunswack, 
and then came the ordeal that tested the consecration of three souls. The young 
scholar whose success was the reward of five long years of self-denial in the 
home, returned to tell his father and mother that God had called him to preach 
the Gospel in China. As Abraham felt when he was called to lay Isaac on the 
altar, the devoted parents felt when they heard that the son of whom they were 
so proud must go away from them to a heathen land. But they recalled the vow r 
of consecration they had uttered over him in infancy and there w T as no question 
in the heart of either parents or son of the duty of the sacrifice. His life of 
service at Amoy, China, where he spent forty years, was abundantly blessed, and 
his parents lived long enough to learn that a rich harvest of souls was the result 
of their surrender of their son. Preaching, teaching in the theological schools 



BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 



37 



and the preparation of valuable text-books filled his busy life with ceaseless 
activity, until at the age of seventy-three years, having just read the last proof 
of his great work, a dictionary of the Chinese language for the use of mis- 
sionaries, he entered into his reward. 

Still another member of the family, the next in age to the missionary son, 
consecrated his talents to the Christian ministry. This was Goyn Talmage, a 




RUINS 01? THE) SITE OF CAPERNAUM 



man of singular sweetness of character and a most devoted pastor. For several 
years he served the Reformed Dutch Church as secretary of the Board of Domes- 
tic Missions, and at the end of his term received the highest honor m the gift of 
the church, in his election to the office of President of the Synod. His pastorates 
were chiefly in New Jersey and New York, and were uniformly successful. He 
had a rare faculty of organization, which he used in the building up of weak 



38 T. DE WITT TAI,MAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

churches, and at the end of his useful life The Christian Intelligencer, the organ 
of his church, bore testimony to the value of his services. " Each church," it 
said, " was stronger when he left it than when he accepted its pastorate. In 
nearly every one a new or improved church building or parsonage stands the 
monument of his wise and vigorous leadership, the testimony of the business 
ability and executive skill which he possessed to an unusual degree. He 
equally built up the spiritual interests of the flock. Drawing hearers to the 
services, and holding them by the power of the truth, and winning 1 them to the 
Gospel, his charges witnessed a steady ingathering of soundly converted mem- 
bers. After he retired from the pastorate, few ministers more continuously 
wrought for the Master and the Church than he. He was much sought after 
by vacant churches, and urged to accept calls, and everywhere was the favorite 
supply. There was a vivacity, sparkle and force about his sermons that com- 
manded attention and held the interest. He was not only a power in the pulpit, 
but also with his pen, and the only regret is that he did not write and publish 
more. Few men were permitted to fill out a better rounded, more honorable, 
or more useful life. He died as be wished, in the harness, permitted to preach 
the truth he held so firmly and loved so much, to the very last." 

THE COST OF AN EDUCATION 

It is not difficult to realize how arduous must have been the strain on the 
finances of that humble household, involved in sen. ding three sons to college. 
The dfyoted parents were grateful to God for giving them sons whose talents 
He could use in his service, and they did not shrink from the sacrifices required 
to fit them for their work. Their youngest and most famous son was a lad of 
only ten years old when his brother Goyn began his collegiate career, and he 
witnessed the effort that it cost. It was no fancy picture that he drew years 
afterward of the untiring industry and the careful frugality which the expense 
entailed. There is evident personal reminiscence in the vivid sketch he drew of 
the home life of chose days of struggle. " Most of the boys who became min- 
isters," he said, " were the sons of those who had terrific struggle to get their 
every-day bread. The collegiate and theological education of that son took 
every luxury from the parental table for eight years. The other children were 
more scantily appareled. 

" The son at college, every little while, got a bundle from home. In it were 
the socks that mother had knit, sitting up late at night, her sight not as good as 
once it was. And there also were some delicacies from the sister's hand for the 
voracious appetite of a hungry student. The father swung the heavy cradle 
through the wheat, the sweat rolling from his chin, bedewing every step of the 
way, and then sitting down under the cherry-tree at noon thinking to himself : ' I 
am fearfully tired, but it will pay if I can once see that boy through college, and if 
I can know that he will be preaching the Gospel after I am dead/ The younger 



BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 39 

children want to know why they can't have this and that as others do, and the 
mother says : ' Be patient, my children, until your brother graduates, and then 
you shall have more luxuries, but we must see that boy through.' 

" Something occurs to me quite personal. I was the youngest of a large family 
of children. Four of the sons wanted collegiate education, and four obtained it, 
but not without great home-struggle. We never heard the old people say once 
•that they were denying themselves to effect this, but I remember now that my 
parents always looked tired. I don't think they ever got rested until they lay 




& * i 




I 





PILGRIMS ON THE MARCH TO BETHLEHEM 

down in the Somerville Cemetery. Mother would sit down in the evening, 
and say : ' Well, I don't know what makes me feel so tired ! ' Father would 
fall immediately to sleep seated by the evening stand, overcome with the day's 
fatigues. I think all of us were willing always to acknowledge our obligation 
to the old folks at home." 

Very tender are all the reminiscences of those devoted parents which again 
and again appear in the sermons of their distinguished son. Here is one that 
touches a vibrating chord in the heart of every filial being. It must have been 
the earliest of his memories : 

" For about fifteen years that cradle was going much of the time. When 
the older child was taken out a smaller child was put in. The crackle of the 



4 o T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

rockers is pleasant yet in my ears. There I took my first lesson in music as 
mother sang to me. I have heard what you would call far better singing since 
then, but none that so thoroughly touched me. She never got five hundred 
dollars per night for singing three songs at the Academy, with two or three 
encores grudgefully thrown in ; but without pay she sometimes sang all night, and 
came out whenever encored, though she had only two little ears for an audience. 
It was a low, subdued tone that sings to me yet across thirty-five years. 

" You see the edge of that rocker worn quite deep ? That is where her foot 
was placed while she sat with her knitting or sewing, on summer afternoons, 
while the bees hummed at the door and the shout of the boy at the oxen was 
heard afield. From the way the rocker is worn, I think that sometimes the foot 
must have been very tired and the ankle very sore ; but I do not think she stopped 
for that. When such a cradle as that got a-going, it kept on for years. 

THE TIRELESS WATCHER. 

" Scarlet-fever came in the door, and we all had it ; and oh, how the cradle 
did go! We contended as to who should lie in it, for sickness, you know, makes 
babies of us all. But after a while we surrendered it to Charlie, He was too old 
to lie in it, but he seemed very, very sick ; and with him in the cradle it was 
k Rock, rock, rock ! ' But one day, just as long ago as you can remember, the 
cradle stopped. When a child is asleep, there is no need of rocking. Charlie 
was asleep. He was sound asleep. Nothing would wake him. He needed 
taking up. Mother was too weak to do it. The neighbors came in to do that, 
and put a flower, fresh out of the garden-dew, between the two still hands. The 
fever had gone out of the cheek, and left it white, very white — the rose exchanged 
for the lily. There was one less to contend for the cradle. It soon started 
again, and with a voice not quite so firm as before, but more tender, the old song 
came back: 'Bye! bye bye!' which meant more to you than II Trozatorc, 
rendered by opera troupe in the presence of an American audience, all leaning 
forward and nodding to show how well they understood Italian. 

" There was a wooden canopy at the head of the old cradle that somehow got 
loose and was taken off. But your infantile mind was most impressed with the 
face which, much of the time, hovered over you. Other women sometimes looked 
in at the child, and although you were not old enough to understand their talk, 
by instinct you knew it was something disagreeable, and began to cry till the dear, 
sweet, familiar face again hovered and the rainbow arched the sky. Oh, we 
never get away from the benediction of such a face! It looks at us through 
storm and night. It smiles all to pieces the world's frown. After thirty-five 
years of rough tumbling on the world's couch, it puts us in the cradle again, 
and hushes us as with the very lullaby of heaven. 

" Eet the old cradle rest in the garret. It has earned its quiet. The hands 
that shook up its pillow have quit work. The foot that kept the rocker in 



BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 



4i 




CORN HUSKING TIME 



42 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

motion is through with its journey. The face that hovered has been veiled from 
mortal sight. Cradle of blessed memories ! Cradle that soothed so many little 
griefs ! Cradle that kindled so many hopes ! Cradle that rested so many 
fatigues ! Sleep now thyself, after so many years of putting others to sleep ! " 

Occasionally, too, there is a note of sorrow, indicating that he was not the 
paragon good boy of the story books. " When I was a boy," he said, " and a 
little reckless, my mother used to say to me, ' DeWitt, you will be sorry for this 
when I am gone.' I remember how she looked, with her cap and spectacles. I 
remember just how she sat with the Bible on her lap. I laughed the admonition 
off, but she never said a truer thing in all her life. I have been sorry for it ever 
since." 

LIFE ON THE FARM 

The restless activity and superabundant energy which characterized his man- 
hood were a part of his boyish make-up. Into the work and sports of a free, 
healthy, vigorous childhood, the young DeWitt appears to have entered with 
ardor. He would laughingly recall the occupations of that time in after years. 
He never forgot the pets of the farm and the pleasure he had in their association. 
" I would like to have in my photograph album," he said, " a portrait of the horses 
that in boyhood we rode to the watering. Sitting here, thinking of all their 
excellencies, we forgive them for all the times they threw us off. The temptation 
was too great for them, and the mud where we fell was soft. The dear old pets ! 
One of them was sold, and as he was driven away we cried such large tears, 
and so many of them, that both coat-sleeves were insufficient to sop up the 
wretchedness. Another broke its leg, and it was taken to the woods and shot. 
We went into the house and held our ears, lest we should hear the cruel bang 
that announced the departure of our favorite sorrel. 

" Another stayed on the place, and was there when we left home. He was 
always driven slowly, had grown uncertain of foot, and ceased to prance at any 
sight or sound. You could no longer make him believe that a wheelbarrow was 
anything supernatural, nor startle him by shaking out a buffalo-skin. He had 
outlived all his contemporaries. Some had frisked out a frivolous life, and had 
passed away. Some had, after a life of kicking and balking, come to an igno- 
minious end; but old Billy had lived on in an earnest way, and every Sunday 
morning stood at the door waiting for the family to get in the wagon and ride 
to church. Then he would jog along seriously, as if conscious that his church 
privileges would soon be gone. In the long line of tied horses beside the church, 
he would stand and listen to the songs inside. While others stamped, and beat 
the flies, and got their feet over the shafts, and slipped the halter, and bit the 
nag on the other side of the tongue, Billy had more regard for the day and place, 
and stood, meditative and decorous. If there be any better place than this world 
for good horses, Billy has gone there. He never bolted; he never kicked. In 
ploughing, he never put his foot over the trace; he never balked; he never put 



BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 



43 



back his ears and squealed. A good, kind, faithful, honest, industrious horse 
was he. He gave us more joy than any ten-thousand-dollar courser could give 
us now. No arched stallion careering on Central Park, or foam-dashed Long 
Island racer, could thrill us like the memory of that family roadster. 

"Alas, for boys in the city, who never ride a horse to brook! An after- 
noon airing in ruffles, stiff and starched, and behind a costumed driver, cannot 
make up for this early disadvantage. The best way to start life is astride a 
farm-horse, with a rope-halter. In that way you learn to rough it. You are 
prepared for hard bounces on the road of life ; you learn to hold on ; you get the 
habit of depending on your own heels, and not upon other people's stirrups ; you 
find how to climb on without anybody to give you a boost. It does not hurt you 
so much when you fall off. And some day, far on in life, when you are in the 




Dr. Talmage and Dr Klopsch Dr. Talmage on Camel-back. 

INCIDENTS OF HOLY LAND TRAVEL 

midst of the hot and dusty city, and you are weary with the rush and din of the 
world, in your imagination you call back one of these nags of pleasant memory. 
You bring him up by the side of your study, or counting-room table, and from 
that you jump on, and away you canter through the old-time orchard, and by the 
old-time meeting-house, or down the lane in front of the barn, dashing into the 
cool, sparkling water of the meadow, where he stops." 



LEAVING HOME 

They were evidently happy years in spite of occasional hardship, and the 
absence of the toys and luxuries which city children commonly enjoy. He had 
ever before him the example of g, father and mother cheerful even in their trials, 



44 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



and' sympathetic with the exuberant spirit of a merry, mischievous boy. It was 
a life productive of health for the body, mind and soul, an excellent foundation 
for a career of manly usefulness. It came to a close all too soon, when having 
chosen the profession of the law, he, too, needed a college education, and once 







WELCOMING THE WANDERER HOME 



more, the old economies must be instituted and the old work performed by the 
now aged hands. Eager as he was to enter the great world, it was with a feeling 
of regret that he left the familiar scenes. This is his own story of the parting: 



BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES 



45 



" The day I left our country home to look after myself, we rode across the country, 
and my father was driving. Of course I said nothing that implied how I felt. 
But there are hundreds of men here who from their own experience know how 
I felt. At such a time a young man may be hopeful, and even impatient, to get 
into the battle of life for himself, but to leave the homestead where everything has 
been done for you ; your father or older brothers taking your part when you were 
imposed on by larger boys ; and when you got the cold, your mother always 
around, with mustard applications for the chest, or herb tea to make you sweat 
off the fever, and sweet mixtures in the cup by the bed to stop the cough, taking 
too much of it, because is was pleasant to take; and then to go out with no one 
sometimes to stand between you and the world, gives one a choking sensation 
at the throat, and a homesickness before you have got three miles away from 
the old folks. 

A PARTING TESTIMONY 

" There was on the day I speak of a silence for a long while, and then my 
father began to tell how good the Lord had been to him, in sickness and in health, 
and when times of hardship came how Providence had always provided the means 
of livelihood for the large household ; and he wound up by saying, ' EJeWitt, I 
have always found it safe to trust the Lord.' My father has been dead thirty 
years, but in all the crises of my life — and there have been many of them — I 
have felt the mighty impetus of that lesson in the farm wagon : ' DeWitt, I 
have always found it safe to trust the Lord.' The fact was, my father saw that 
it was his opportunity, and he improved it." 




MAKING A START 




LEAVING COLLEGE — YOUTHFUL HONORS AND AMBITIONS — PREACHING IN THE 
WOODS — THE FURNISHING OE THE PARSONAGE — EMANCIPATION FROM MANU- 
SCRIPT IN THE PULPIT 



O parents such as those at the head of the Talmage family, one question 
dominates every other in dealing with their children. They rejoice 
in the promise of ability and take delight in every indication of grow- 
ing intelligence and mental capacity, but the supreme question is 
whether that radical change of heart which we call the new birth, 
has taken place. There is nothing in the child's character that they 
so much desire to see. The promise of worldly greatness is noted with keen 
interest, but they can never be content until they are convinced that their child 
has entered into that living union with Christ which is eternal life. Many were 
the prayers put up for the young De Witt. All the other children had made pro- 
fession of their faith, but their youngest was still a stranger to the household 
of God. 

DECIDING FOR CHRIST 

In a few words Dr. Talmage narrated the circumstances which led to the 
great change that his parents so anxiously longed for. He said : 

u Truman Osborne, one of the evangelists who went through this country 
some years ago, had a wonderful art in the right direction. He came to my 
father's house one day, and while we were all seated in the room, he said: 
'Mr. Talmage, are all your children Christians?' Father said: 'Yes, all but 
DeWitt.' Then Truman Osborne looked down into the fireplace, and began 
to tell a story of a storm that came on the mountains, and all the sheep were 
in the fold; but there was one lamb outside that perished in the storm. Had 
he looked me in the eye, I should have been angered when he told me that 
story ; but he looked into the fireplace, and it was so pathetically and beautifully 
done that I never found any peace until I was inside the fold, where the other 
sheep are." 

It was a subject too sacred and hallowed for public discussion and he 
always shrank from a description of the throes of soul by which he entered 
46 



MAKING A START 



47 




into life. Only by an incidental reference do we learn of the final scene. It 
was on a Sunday afternoon that the great question was decided. He was 
aione and was pondering the momentous subject of his acceptance by Christ. 
As frequently happens with young seekers, a sense of personal unworthiness 
held him back from the peace of trust. As he meditated on the blessedness of 
those who enter the kingdom and the conditions 
required of the disciple, the incident of the Syro- 
phcenician woman crossed his mind. Howso- 
ever iow he might place himself, howsoever un- 
worthy he might deem himself, he might still 
plead, as did the woman in the Gospel, that 
" even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from 
the master's table." That thought brought 
peace to his soul and gave him the hope that 
he needed. A few weeks afterwards he pre- 
sented himself to the consistory of the church 
of which his father was an elder, as a candidate 
for admission to membership, and was accepted. 
He was eighteen years old at that time. Forty- 
six years afterwards, the little church in which 
he tremblingly made his confession of faith, was 
crowded to its utmost capacity to hear him 
preach the Gospel that within those four walls 
he had vowed to make the rule of his life, and which he so faithfully kept. 

Dr. Talmage's college career gave no indication of his future eminence. 
He was regarded as eccentric rather than brilliant. He was fluent of speech 
and his manner dramatic, but his style was not of the regulation pattern. He 
could not be induced to divide his sermons into the ordinary heads and the 
theological phraseology did not come easily to his utterance. " You must 
change your style, DeWitt," his tutor said to him, " otherwise no pulpit will open 
to you." The churches to which, in common with other students, he was sent 
as a supply, seemed afraid of him. Many of the members enthusiastically advo- 
cated giving him a call, but there was always a powerful majority who were 
repelled by his unconventional utterances and were opposed to inviting to their 
pulpit a man so unlike the usual pulpit orator. 

He would not change his style or his sermonic model. He was convinced 
that if he succeeded at all it must be by being himself and using his own talents, 
instead of Saul's armor, which did not fit him. Yet he was anxious to perfect 
himself as a public speaker and never missed an opportunity of speaking in the 
college debating society and often with a rugged eloquence which electrified his. 
audience. One of Dr. Talmage's nephews tells a characteristic story of him at 
this period of his career. The young student paid a visit to his elder brother, 



R£V. T. D£ WITT TAI.MAGE, D.D. 
Photograph Taken in 1859 



48 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK. 

John, who at that time was temporarily supplying a pulpit in Niskayuna, N. Y., 
while waiting for his appointment to China. DeWitt inveigled his nephew into 
putting an empty barrel on a wheelbarrow and trundling it into the woods. 
Arriving at a natural amphitheatre in a secluded part of the wood, the barrel was 
set on end and DeWitt mounted it. He immediately commenced a declamation, 
trying the scope of his voice, and testing its penetrating power. In a few minutes 
he commenced a sermon and was soon arguing persuasively with the denizens of 
the forest, pleading, warning, denouncing and entreating with all the ardor of a 
preacher in a well-filled church. The lad, who was his only auditor, lived to see 
the time when thousands were spell-bound by that same voice. 

At the close of Dr. Talmage's theological course in New Brunswick, N. J., 
the members of the little church at Belleville, N. J., sent him a most cordial 
invitation to become their pastor. It was a quiet little town, but he gladly accepted 
the opportunity it gave him of opening his ministry, for which he had given so 
many years of patient preparation. He spent three happy years with the people 
of Belleville, steadily growing, not only in power as a preacher, but in hold upon 
the hearts of the people. The salary was only eight hundred dollars a year. 
When that had been proposed to him at the theological school, he, with the poverty 
of the student fresh before him, thought it sounded like a prince's income. But 
when he came on the ground, with an empty pocketbook, and an unfurnished 
house on his hands, the salary did not look so large. But the difficulty was 
solved in a happy way. 

HOW THE PARSONAGE WAS FURNISHED 

Many years afterwards, preaching on the subject of hospitality from II 
Kings 4: 8: " And it fell on a day, that Elisha passed to Shunem, where was a 
great woman," he told the story of how the Belleville parsonage came to its 
furnishings. He says : 

" This woman of the text was only a type of thousands of men and women 
who come down from mansion and from cot to do kindness to the Lord's servants. 
I could tell you of something that you might think a romance. A young man 
graduated from New Brunswick Theological Seminary was called to a village 
church. He had not the means to furnish the parsonage. After three or four 
weeks of preaching, a committee of the officers of the church waited on him and 
told him he looked tired and thought he had better take a vacation of a few days. 
The young pastor took it as an intimation that his work was done or not acceptable. 
He took the vacation, and at the end of a few days came back, when an old elder 
said : ' Here is the key of the parsonage. We have been cleaning up ; you had 
better go up and look at it.' So the young pastor took the key, went up to the 
parsonage, opened the door, and lo! it was carpeted, and there was the hat-rack 
all ready for the canes and the umbrellas and the overcoats, and on the left hand 
of the hall was the parlor sofaed, chaired, pictured. He passed on to the other 
side of the hall, and there was the study-table in the centre of the floor with 



MAKING A START 49 

stationery upon it, bookshelves built, long range of new volumes far beyond the 
reach of the means of the young pastor, many of these volumes. 

A SURPRISED PASTOR. 

" The young pastor went up-stairs, and all the sleeping apartments were 
furnished ; came down-stairs and entered the pantry, and there were the spices and 
the coffees and the sugars and groceries for six months' supply. He went down 
into the cellar and there was the coal for all the coming winter. He went into the 
dining-hall and there was the table already set — the glass and the silverware. He 
went into the kitchen, and there were all the culinary implements and a great 
stove. The young pastor lifted one lid of the stove and he found the fuel all 
ready for ignition. Putting back the cover of the stove, he saw on another part of 
it a lucifer match, and all that young man had to do' in starting to keep house was 
to strike the match. You tell me that is apocryphal. Oh, no ; that was my own 
experience. Oh, the enlarged sympathies sometimes clustering around those who 
enter the Gospel ministry! I suppose the men of Shunem had to pay the bills, 
but it was the large-hearted Christian sympathies of the women of Shunem that 
looked after the Lord's messenger." 

While the pastorate at Belleville was quiet, and the great world knew nothing 
about it, the man who was ere long to capture the ear of the world was coming 
to know men and women in the streets of the little town. The human heart is 
alike everywhere, in the little village or in the great city. And Dr. Talmage, who, 
throughout his entire career, was to be the great preacher to the heart, made his 
first great studies in heart investigation in Belleville. Long afterward, preach- 
ing on the subject of " Recognition in Heaven," he used this illustration, showing 
how the memories of the pastoral experiences in his first church remained with 
him. He says : 

" In my first settlement at Belleville, a plain man said to me, ' What do you 
think I heard last night? I was in the room where one of my neighbors was 
dying. He was a good man, and he said he heard the angels of God singing 
before the throne. I haven't much poetry about me, but I listened, and I heard 
them too.' Said I, ' I have no doubt of it.' Why, we are to be taken up to heaven 
at last by ministering spirits. Who are they to be? Souls that went up from 
Madras, or Antioch, or Jerusalem ? Oh, no ; our glorified kindred are going to 
troup around us." 

EMANCIPATION FROM MANUSCRIPT IN THE PULPIT 

A delightful little reminiscence from Dr. Talmage's own pen, probably some- 
what antedating his Belleville experience, is worth recalling here. It may serve 
as a hint to other young and aspiring preachers, who cherish dreams of becoming 
famous as " eloquent divines." 

" We entered the ministry," he writes, " with a mental horror of extempo- 
raneous speaking. Each week we wrote two sermons and a lecture all out, from 
4 



5o T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

the text to the amen. We did not dare to give out the notice of a prayer-meeting 
unless it was on paper. We were a slave to manuscript, and the chains were gall- 
ing; and three months more of such work would have put us in the graveyard. 
We resolved on emancipation. The Sunday night was approaching when we 
expected to make violent rebellion against this bondage of pen and paper. We 
had an essay about ten minutes long on some Christian subject, which we pro- 
posed to preach as an introduction to the sermon, resolved, at the close of that 
brief composition, to launch out on the great sea of extemporaneousness. 

" It so happened that the coming Sabbath night was to be eventful in the 
village. The trustees of the church had been building a gasometer back of the 
church, and the night I speak of the building was for the first time to be lighted 
in the modern way. The church was, of course, crowded — not so much to hear 
the preacher as to see how the gas would burn. Many were unbelieving, and said 
that there would be an explosion, or a big fire, or that in the midst of the service 
the lights would go out. Several brethren, disposed to hang on to old customs, 
declared that candles and oil were the only fit material for lighting a church, and 
they denounced the innovation as indicative of vanity on the part of the new- 
comers. They used oil in the ancient temple, and it was that which ran down on 
Aaron's beard, and anything that was good enough for the whiskers of an old- 
time priest was good enough for a country meeting-house. These sticklers for 
the oil were present that night, hoping — and I think some of them secretly praying 
— that the gas might go out. 

" With our ten-minute manuscript we went into the pulpit, all in a tremor. 
Although the gas did not burn as brightly as its friends had hoped, still it was 
bright enough to show the people the perspiration that stood in beads on our 
forehead. We began our discourse, and every sentence gave us the feeling that we 
were one step nearer the gallows. We spoke very slowly, so as to make the ten- 
minute notes last fifteen minutes. During the preachment of the brief manuscript 
we concluded that we had never been called to the ministry. We were in a hot 
bath of excitement. People noticed our trepidation, and supposed it was because 
we were afraid the gas would go out. Alas ! our fear was that it would not go 
out. As we came toward the close of our brief we joined the anti-gas party, and 
prayed that before we came to the last written line something would burst and 
leave us in the darkness. Indeed, we discovered an encouraging flicker amid the 
burners, which gave us the hope that the brief which lay before us would be long 
enough for all practical purposes, and that the hour of execution might be post- 
poned to some other night. As we came to the sentence next to the last the lights 
fell down to half their size, and we could just manage to see the audience as they 
were floating away from our vision. We said to ourselves, ' Why can't these 
lights be obliging and go out entirely?' The wish was gratified. As we 
finished the last line of our brief, and stood on the verge of rhetorical destruc- 
tion, the last glimmer of light was extinguished. ' It is impossible to proceed/ we 
cried out : ' receive the benediction ! ' 



MAKING A START 



Si 



" We crawled down the pulpit in a state of exhilaration ; we never before saw 
such handsome darkness. The odor of the escaping gas was to us like ' gales from 
Araby.' Did a frightened young man ever have such fortunate deliverance ? The 
providence was probably intended to humble the trustees, yet the scared preacher 
took advantage of it. 

" But after we got home we saw the wickedness of being in such dread. 
As the Lord got us out of that predicament, we resolved never again to be cor- 
nered in one similar. Forthwith the thraldom was broken, we hope never again 
to be felt. How demeaning that a man with a message from the Lord Almighty 
should be dependent upon paper-mills and gasometers ! " 





BUILDING A FOUNDATION 

PASTORATES AT BELLEVILLE, SYRACUSE AND PHILADELPHIA — A TEMPTATION OVER- 
COME — GROWING IN FAME AS A PREACHER — THE SECRET OF HIS POPULARITY 
— A UNIQUE STYLE OF PULPIT ORATORY — A TEMPERANCE LESSON — THE WRECK 
OF A SOUL 



LL great things must have time to grow. A mushroom can be grown 
overnight, but an oak tree takes half a thousand years. But the 
mushroom perishes with the passing hours, while the oak, fashioned 
into the skeleton of a great ship, will dare the storms of any sea. It 
take's time to build a great career, and the beginnings must be small. 
There must be the steady development, time to send down roots, a 
chance for nature and culture to insure a large and useful personality. Talmage 
began right. It was the proper launching of a ship intended for a long voyage. 
In the Theological School, the disgusted professor, who went in for the 
old formal style of pulpit delivery, had declared that if he did not change 
his style no church in the country would want to hear him preach. Talmage 
did not change his style. With the daring of youth, he went on being 
his natural self, uttering his own thoughts, clothing them in his own orig- 
inal and brilliant and often exuberant language. It was all novel and 
unique ; the people had never heard anything like it. Some old fogies shook 
their heads, and thought no good could come of it, but the great majority 
of the people were attracted and fascinated. It was earnest, it was fresh and 
unhackneyed, it was picturesque ; it challenged attention ; nobodv went to sleep, 
and hearing him once, the listener wanted to hear him again. And so the con- 
gregation grew 7 , and the fame of this earnest and unusual young preacher went 
abroad. The people in Syracuse. New York, as far away then as Chicago 
would be now, heard of him, and sent their spies, who came back with such 
clusters of grapes and samples of pomegranates that 

A FLATTERING CALL 

was sent to Belleville. As this gave him a wider field for usefulness, Dr. Tal- 
mage accepted it. It was in Syracuse that he first began to attract wide atten- 
tion throughout the country. Instead of becoming more conservative, he 
became more daring in giving full play to his individuality. If a thing is good 
52 



BUILDING A FOUNDATION 



53 



enough you do not need to advertise it in the daily paper in order for people 
to find out about it. Some one will get traces of it, and noise it abroad. God 
hides the great veins of gold deep in the fastnesses of the hills, but if there be 
one little jutting nose of quartz thrust out of the edge of the cliff, the pros- 
pector, searching for the precious metal, will find it, and the miners will tear 
down the hills, and tunnel the mountains to get the hidden gold. This young 
preacher in Syracuse had an eloquence all his own. There were other men as 
earnest, other men as scholarly, other men with equal knowledge of books and 
of human nature who attracted no especial attention. But here was a man 
with unique gifts, who thought in pictures, and who dared to speak his thoughts. 
The great artist sees pictures, and has the skill to paint them. Talmage beheld 
pictures in his imagination, pictures with the red blood of life in them, and he 
had the eloquent tongue to make them live before the people who sat in the 



a«tv : ,t :; 




IN THE OLD HAYFIELD 

seats before him. Some criticised, many said his language was exaggerated; 
that his style was unministerial ; but none of these things mattered with the com- 
mon people. He spoke to their hearts : he comforted them. He made Christ 
real to them. Religion became interesting and attractive. Under his touch 
the Bible became a new book, full of living personalities, and they flocked to 
the place where he preached and filled it to overflowing. 

But Syracuse could not keep the preacher long. Calls came from all 
over the country. The one that seemed to offer the greatest opportunitv for an 
enlarged sphere of usefulness came from Philadelphia. And in 1862 he accepted 
a call from the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia, and for the first time 
found himself with a solid platform under his feet in a great city. His popularitv 
here was instantaneous and phenomenal, 



54 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

F • ' ' 



■ \ 





ON THE MARGIN OE THE SEA OE GALILEE 
Visited by Dr. Talmage During One of His Tours 



BUILDING A FOUNDATION 



55 



He took the old Quaker City by surprise. His style, his use of illustra- 
tions, his informality, his startling and dramatic presentation of Gospel truth, 
was so strikingly in contrast with everything else Philadelphia knew, that the 
multitudes of every class crowded to hear him. Many young men, finding them- 
selves suddenly popular, invited everywhere, praised by the people and the 
press, flattered by the appreciation of an applauding multitude, have lost their 
heads, and have ceased to grow, and because of that have been but the fad of a 
few months. It had a different effect on Taimage. He realized his danger, 
and saw that if he was to hold this great crowd of people, and permanently 
serve them, and help them, he must have something worth while to bring to 
them at every service. He set himself to work as he never had worked before 
in the preparation of his discourses. Every theme he touched he treated in an 
exhaustive way in this, that he came before the people, knowing more about it 
than any man in his audience, having gathered from, the whole world of nature 
and literature and art and observation the freshest things to illustrate his theme. 

This added sense of responsibility, because of his very success, was shown 
in other ways, notably in one striking incident. Not long after his coming to 
the Quaker City, a tobacco 
merchant, who was one of the 
leading members of the Sec- 
ond Reformed Church, called 
on him one day in his study, 
and with the nostril trained 
for the scent of the weed, de- 
tected the odor of tobacco. He 
said nothing about it at the 
call. On shaking hands with 
his pastor, he remarked, as 
though it had just occurred to 
him, that he would give him- 
self the pleasure of sending the 
preacher some choice cigars. 
Sure enough, the very next 
day, Dr. Taimage found on 
his study table a box of fragrant Havanas, and a card informing him that it was 
sent with the compliments of his caller of the day before. Taimage took out a cigar, 
and held it for a few moments in profound reflection. He enjoyed smoking, and 




?f 




T. DEWITT TALMAGE AT 25 IN HIS 45TH Y£AR 



THE FRAGRANT WEED 

was attractive to him. But his new sense of responsibility concerning the great 
opportunitv which was evidently his, was upon him, and as he twirled the cigar 
between his fingers, he said to himself: "Shall I smoke and enjoy these, and 



56 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

thus very likely impair my influence with this man and his friends, and my con- 
gregation in general, or shall I put influence and example first ? " It was a 
decisive hour. It was a critical moment. The thing itself may have been 
small, but it was a great thing as indicating the spirit of the man. He made 
his decision, laid the cigar back in the box, carefully closed it, and wrapping it 
up again, returned it to his friend and parishioner with this brief but decisive 
note : 

"My Dear Sir: — I have stopped smoking — quit to-day. T. D. W. T." 

This incident is a window into Dr. Talmage's heart and mind at this time, 
showing that success and applause worked in him the result which it can never 
work except in great men. It made him humble, and not proud. 

It was from Philadelphia that the fame of his preaching first went forth and 
became national. He left his enduring impress upon the Quaker City. There 
he drew such congregations, for seven years, as no other pastor had ever done 
with the sole exception, perhaps, of Phillips Brooks, who was his contempo- 
rary. It was while Dr. Talmage was pastor of the Second Reformed Church of 
Philadelphia that he had his military experience as chaplain of a Pennsylvania 
regiment during the war. 

During this time his marvelous power of presenting religious truths in lan- 
guage lofty enough for the cultured and simple enough for the plainest people 
began to be fully recognized, and before he left the church was unable to hold 
one-fourth of the multitude who sought admission. He also commenced the 
series of platform lectures which became so prominent a feature of his public 
career. 

HIS STYLE OF DELIVERY 

Dr. Talmage's pulpit style of delivery is very hard to describe to one who 
never heard him. In the first place, he had no " pulpit style," seeing that he 
abominated a pulpit, and never permitted one where he was to preach, if he 
could help it. He was a big man, physically, as well as mentally, and he needed 
room. In his own church he always had a big platform, and the deck was 
cleared for action. In an ordinary sermon he would be all over that platform 
during the discourse, and there would not be a man, woman or child in the 
great audience who would not at some time during the sermon feel that the 
preacher had spied him out, and was delivering the discourse for his or her 
benefit. He preached with every inch of his body. His frame shook with 
eloquent denunciation. The cheek flushed or paled, the tears rose to the 
eyes, the teeth set, 

THE HANDS CLENCHED 

until the doubled fist was like a thunderbolt, or opened and swept in gentle 
gesture like a benediction. The whole body was one and all a part of the 
sermon. Sometimes there was a rush across the platform, and the audience 



BUILDING A FOUNDATION 



57 



felt so en rapport with the preacher that it seemed the most natural thing in the 
world, and the preacher himself seemed to them like a veritable giant hurling 
himself against his foe. 

One of the peculiarities of Dr. Talmage's genius was that he took advan- 
tage of everything. He did not permit himself to be baffled or preyed upon 
by disadvantageous circumstances. He met them boldly and preyed upon the 
circumstances and compelled them to serve his purpose. He seized instanta- 
neously upon the weather, upon any public occurrence, and upon everything that 
would touch the mood of his audience, and made it help him in his great work. 

Some of the most beautiful incidents of his pastorate in the Quaker City 
are referred to in his published sermons, and he never failed to draw a whole- 
some lesson from them. 

" When I was living in Philadelphia," he said, " there was an aged bank 
president — he was somewhere in the nineties. At the close of the business of 
the day he came home, lay down on the sofa, and said to his daughter : ' My 
time has come and I must go away from you.' ' Why,' she said, ' father, are 
you sick? Shall I send for the 
doctor?' 'Oh, no,' he replied, 
' I am not sick, but the time has 
come for me to go. You have it 
put in the morning papers about 
my death, so that they will not 
expect me in business circles/ 
And instantly he ceased to 
breathe. That was beautiful — 
that was a glorious transition 
from the world ! And the time 
will come when men will leave 
the world without a pang." 

THE WRECK OF A SOUL 

While he was in Philadelphia regimental chaplain in his 6oth year 
an incident occurred which pro- 
duced a lasting effect on his whole life and made him the inveterate foe of intem- 
perance. He himself related it in these words : 

" I had a friend in the West — a rare friend. He was one of the first to wel- 
come me to my new home. To fine personal appearance, he added a generosity, 
frankness, and ardor of nature that made me love him like a brother. But I 
saw evil people gathering around him. They came up from the saloons, from 
the theatres, from the gambling-hells. They plied him with a thousand arts. 
They seized upon his social nature, and he could not stand the charm. They 
drove him on the rocks, like a ship full-winged, shivering on the breakers. I 





58 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

used to admonish him. I would say, ' Now I wish you would quit these bad 
habits, and become a Christian.' ' Oh,' he would reply, ' I would like to ; I 
would like to ; but I have gone so far I don't think there is any way back.' In 
his moments of repentance, he would go home and take his little girl of eight 
years, and embrace her convulsively, and cover her with adornments, and strew 
around her pictures and toys, and everything that could make her happy ; and 
then, as though hounded by an evil spirit, he would go out to the inflaming cup 
and the house of shame, like a fool to the correction of the stocks. 

" I was summoned to his death-bed. I hastened. I entered the room. I 
found him, to my surprise, lying in full every-day dress on the top of the 
couch. I put out my hand. He grasped it excitedly, and said, ' Sit down, 
Mr. Talmage, right there.' I sat down. He said, ' Last night I saw my 
mother, who has been dead twenty years, and she sat just where you sit now. 
It was no dream. I was wide awake. There was no delusion in the matter. 
I saw her just as plainly as I see you. ' Wife, I wish you would take these 
strings off of me. There are strings spun all around my body. I wish you 
would take them off of me.' I saw it was delirium. ' Oh,' replied his wife, 
' my dear, there is nothing there, there is nothing there.' He went on, and 
said, ' Just where you sit, Mr. Talmage, my mother sat. She said to me, ' Ros- 
well, I do wish you would do better.' I got out of bed, put my arms around 
her, and said, ' Mother, I want to do better. 1 have been trying to do better. 
Won't you help me to do better? You used to help me." No mistake about 
it, no delusion. I saw her — the cap and the apron and the spectacles, just as 
she used to look twenty years ago. But I do wish you would take these strings 
away. They annoy me so. I can hardly talk. Won't you take them away?' 
I knelt down and prayed, conscious of the fact that he did not realize what I 
was saying. I got up. I said, 'Good-bye; I hope you will be better soon.' 
He said, ' Good-bye, good-bye.' 

EVIL COMPANIONSHIP 

" That night his soul went to the God who gave it. Arrangements were 
made for the obsequies. Some said, ' Don't bring him in the church ; he was 
too dissolute.' ' Oh,' I said, ' bring him. He was a good friend of mine 
while he was alive, and I shall stand by him now that he is dead. Bring him to 
the church.' 

" As I sat in the pulpit and saw his body coming up through the aisle, I felt 
as if I could weep tears of blood. On the other side of the pulpit were the 
men who had destroyed him. There they sat, hard-visaged, some of them 
pale from exhausting disease, some of them flushed until it seemed 
as if the fires of iniquity flamed through the cheek and crackled 
the lips. They were the men who had done the work. They were 
the men who had bound him hand and foot. They had kindled the fires. They 



BUILDING A FOUNDATION 



59 



had poured the wormwood and gall into that orphan's cup. Did they weep? 
No. Did they sigh repentingly? No. Did they say, 'What a pity that such 
a brave man should be slain? ' No, no ; not one bloated hand was lifted to wipe 
a tear from a bloated cheek. They sat and looked at the coffin like vultures 
gazing at the carcass of a lamb whose heart they had ripped out ! I cried in 
their ears as plainly as I could, ' There is a God and a judgment day, and an 
awful hell for those who destroy their fellows.' Did they tremble? Oh, no, 
no. They went back from the house of God, and that night, though their vic- 
tim was laid in Oakwood Cemetery, I was told that they blasphemed, and they 
drank, and they gambled, and there was not one less customer in all the houses 
of iniquity. This destroyed man was a Samson in physical strength, but Delilah 
sheared him, and the Philistines of evil companionship dug his eyes out and 
threw him into the prison of evil habits, and ' he made sport for them.' But 
in the hour of his death he rose up and took hold of the two pillared curses of 
God against drunkenness and uncleanness, and threw himself forward, until 
down upon him and his com- 
panions there came the thun- Wk HH 
ders of an eternal catastrophe. 

Oh, beware of evil companion- mr' ' 

ship ! " 

NAILING A SLANDER. 

During his Philadelphia pas- 
torate, Dr. Talmage in one of 
his sermons on " Lying About 
Ministers," took occasion to 
make the following personal 
statement : 

" There is a falsehood which 
strikes a different key, for it 
strikes the sanctity of my home ; 
and when I tell the story the 
fair-minded men and women 

and children of the land will be indignant. I will read it, so that if any one may 
want to copy it, they can. It has been stated over and over again in private circles, 
and hinted in newspapers, until tens of thousands of people have heard the report, 
that sixteen or seventeen years ago' I went sailing on the Schuylkill River with my 
wife and her sister, who was my sister-in-law ; that the boat capsized, and, 
having the opportunity of saving either my wife or her sister, I let my wife drown 
and saved the sister, I marrying her in sixty days. 

" I propose to nail the infamous lie on the forehead of every villain, man or 
woman, who shall utter it again, and to invoke the law to help me. One beautiful 
summer morning, my own sister, Sarah Talmage Whitenack, and her daughter 




IN HIS 6STH YEAR A LATER PHOTOGRAPH 



6o 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



Mary, being on a visit to us in Philadelphia, I proposed we go to Fairmount Park 
and make it pleasant for them. With my wife and child, she being a little 
daughter, my sister Sarah and her daughter, I started for Fairmount. Having 
just moved to Philadelphia I was ignorant of the topography of the suburb. 
Passing along by the river I saw a rowboat and proposed a row. I hired a boat and 
we got in. We did not know anything of the dam across the river, and, un- 
warned by the keeper of the boat of any danger, I pulled straight for the brink, 
suspecting nothing until we saw some one wildly waving on the shore as though 
there was danger. I looked back, and lo ! we were already in a current of the 
dam. 

" With a terror that you cannot imagine, I tried to back the boat, but in 
vain. We went over. The boat capsized. My wife instantly disappeared and 
was drawn under the dam, from which her body was not brought until days after ; 
I, not able to swim a stroke, my niece hanging on to me. my sister Sarah clinging 
to the other side of the boat. A boat from shore rescued us. The survivors of 
the party got into the boat, and we looked around for the fairest and the best in 
all the group, but she was gone. And then I saw under the wave the straw hat 
of my little child, and I clutched for it as with a death-grip, and I hauled her in, 
black with strangulation. There were five of us w 7 ho first got into the boat, 
but there were only four of us who landed. For six days and nights the 
gunners stood firing the cannon across that river, the artillerymen expecting, 
by the disturbance of the air, to raise the body from the bottom of the river. 
They succeeded ; but oh ! what a change between that bright June morning 
w r hen we went out with laughter and song, and that afternoon when we came 
across the Schuylkill Bridge in a close carriage, four of us ; my half-dead and 
motherless child, wrapped in flannels, lying en my lap. Oh, God, upon such a 
bright morning, did there ever drop such a horrible night? 

" Not until nine months after the tragedy on the Schuylkill did I even 
know of the existence of my present wife. Nine months after that calamity on 
the Schuylkill, she was introduced to me by my brother, the Rev. Goyn Tal- 
mage. My first wife's name was Mary R. Avery, a member of the Reformed 
Church, Harrison Street, South Brooklyn, where there are many hundreds of 
people who could tell the story." 




THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 

A FLATTERING CALL FROM SEVENTEEN PERSONS — THE FIRST TABERNACLE — ATTACK 

AND VINDICATION CITY MISSION WORK PREACHING TO THE WORLD 

THROUGH A SYNDICATE — DR. KLOPSCH's INFLUENCE ON DR. TALMAGE'S CAREER 
— A TOUR THROUGH " UNDERGROUND NEW YORK " — FIRE AND REHABILITA- 
TION — THE STEADY GROWTH IN FAME AND USEFULNESS 



f N 1869, while he was still in his Philadelphia pastorate, Dr. Talmage 
received simultaneous calls to Chicago, Brooklyn and San Francisco. 
He finally decided, after much reflection, to go to Brooklyn. He 
believed that city needed him most, and that it gave the largest oppor- 
tunity for a widespread and useful ministry. He had passed seven 
happy and triumphant years in Philadelphia. When asked how he 
came to leave Philadelphia, when everything was so prosperous in connection 
with his pastorate there, he replied, " Because it was too easy." He felt 
that Brooklyn summoned him to heavier work than he had yet done, and 
he wisely chose the harder path as being the one of highest usefulness. 

His call to Brooklyn bore only seventeen signatures, and yet it was the unan- 
imous call of the church, for those seventeen names comprised the entire mem- 
bership. They had a large building, but their preachers had of late been preach- 
ing to empty pews. The church stood in the midst of a teeming population, and 
yet stood there empty, exerting no practical influence on the community. 

THE TRANSFORMATION 

Dr. Talmage preached his first sermon in the Brooklyn church in March, 
1869, to a very small congregation. Twenty-five years later, in his quarter-cen- 
tury's sermon, he said : " My first sermon was in the old church on Schermer- 
horn Street, to an audience chiefly of empty seats, for the church was almost 
extinguished." But it was not empty long. Every man who heard the first ser- 
mon went out to tell his neighbor that a pulpit genius had come to Brooklyn, 
and the neighbor thought he would risk going over once to see what had turned 
his friend's head. If he was not already strongly rooted somewhere else, he 
went regularly after that, and in turn told other neighbors. In a few weeks the 
church, which had been thought to be too large, was crowded to overflowing. 

61 



62 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Various plans of usefulness were inaugurated, among others, a lay college, which 
was maintained for several years. But the attraction at the Tabernacle was not 
its institutions ; it was the wonderful preaching of its pastor, and that sufficed to 
fill the huge building whenever the doors were open. Many thought that this 
would not last, but it not only lasted, it grew, and at every service more people 
came than could get inside the doors. Within a year, it was decided to erect a 
new church building capable of seating three thousand. The new Tabernacle 
was built, and Dr. Talmage's first sermon was from the text, " Compel them to 
come in." In that sermon are some very striking paragraphs illustrating the 
young preacher's idea of what a church ought to be. He said : 

THE JOYOUSNESS OF RELIGION 

" Religion is a joyous thing. I do not want to hear anybody talk about 
religion as though it were a funeral. I do not want anybody to whine in the 
prayer-meeting about the kingdom of God. I do not want any man to roll up 
his eyes, giving in that way evidence of his sanctity. The men and women of 
God whom I happen to know, for the most part, find religion a great joy. It i> 
exhilaration to the body ; it is invigoration to the mind ; it is rapture to the 
soul ; it is balm for all wounds ; it is light for all darkness ; it is harbor from all 
storms; and though God knows that some of them have trouble enough now, 
they rejoice because they are on the way to congratulations eternal. 

A TEMPLE OF HUMAN HEARTS 

" I stopped one nightfall, years ago. at Freyburg. Switzerland, to hear the 
organ of world-wide celebrity in that place. I went into the cathedral at night- 
fall. All the accessories were favorable. There was only one light in all the 
cathedral, and that, a faint taper on the altar. I looked up into the venerable 
arches, and saw the shadows of centuries ; and when the organ awoke, the cathe- 
dral awoke, and all the arches seemed to lift and quiver as the music came under 
them. That instrument did not seem to be made out of wood and metal, but out 
of human hearts, so wonderfully did it pulsate with every emotion ; now laugh- 
ing like a child, now sobbing like a tempest. At one moment the music would 
die away until you could hear the cricket chirp outside the wall, and then it 
would roll up until it seemed as if the surge of the sea and the crash of an 
avalanche had struck the organ-pipes at the same moment. At one time that 
night it seemed as if a squadron of saddened spirits going up from earth had met 
a squadron of descending angels whose glory beat back the woe. Standing there 
and looking at the dim taper on the altar of the cathedral, I said : ' How much 
like many a Christian's life ! Shadows hover, and sometimes his hope is dim 
and faint and flickering, like a taper on the altar. But at what time God wills. 
the heavens break forth with music upon his soul, and the air becomes resonant 
as the angels of God beat it with their shining sceptres.' 



THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 



63 






ROYAL PALACE, COPENHAGEN, DENMARK 
Visited by Dr. Talmage During One of His European Tours 



6 4 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



" The Lord God has many fair and beautiful daughters, but the fairest of 
them all is she whose ways are pleasantness and whose paths are peace ! I know 
some people look back on the family line, and they see they are descended from 
the Puritans or Huguenots, and they rejoice in that; but I look back on my 
family line, and I see there is such a mingling and mixture of the blood of all 
nationalities that I feel akin to all the world ; and by the blood of the Son of God, 
who died for all people, I address you in the bonds of universal brotherhood. T 
come out as only a servant, bringing an invitation to a party, and I put it into 




A CHAMBER IN THE CATACOMBS, AT ROME 
Visited by Dr. Talmage During One of His Tours 

your hands, saying : ' Come, for all things are now ready,' and I urge it upon 
you and continue to urge it, and before I get through, I hope, by the blessing 
of God, to compel you to come in." 



PASTOR. SPURGEON'S COMMENDATION 

For originality, power, and splendor of rhetoric, Dr. Talmage's sermons 
were unsurpassed in his own day and generation. The ablest critics here and 
abroad have marked them as among the greatest pulpit productions of any age 
or country. That eminent divine and learned author, the Rev. E. D. G. Prime, 
of New York, wrote of them : 



THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 65 

" These sermons I regard as among the best specimens of the simple, earnest, 
and pungent presentation of the solemn and precious truths of the Gospel that 
I have ever read, and having a fertility of illustration that is marvelous." 

Mr. Spurgeon also had a great admiration for the Talmagian sermon, and 
speaking from the platform of his Tabernacle in London, said: 

" Dr. Talmage's discourses lay hold of my inmost soul. The Lord is with 
this mighty man of valor. So may he ever be till the campaign closes with vic- 
tory ! I am indeed glad of his voice. It cheers me intensely. He loves the 
Gospel, and believes in something which some preachers hardly do. There are 
those who use the labels, but the articles are not the same. May the Lord win 
armies of souls to Jesus by this man! I am astonished when God blesses me, 
but somehow I should not be so much surprised if he blesses this man." 

When the late D. L. Moody was in England on one of his evangelistic tours, 
he found to his surprise that Dr. Talmage's sermons had "ten readers in Great 
Britain where any other American sermons have one reader." 

Another brief paragraph suggests the sturdiness of his opinions even at that 
early date, concerning the kind of church necessary to reach the great public. 

" I think we compel the people to stay out by our church architecture. 
People come in and they find things angular, and cold, and stiff, and they go 
away, never again to come; when the church ought to be a great home-circle, 
everybody having a hymn-book giving half of it to the one next him, 
every one who has a hand to shake hands, shaking hands — the church 
architecture and the church surroundings saying to the people : ' Come in and 
be at home.' Let us all repent of our sins and begin on the other track, and 
by our heartiness of affection and warmth of manner and imploration of the 
Spirit of God, compel the people to come in." 

In a sermon preached long years afterward, on " Echoes," from the text, 
" The sounding again of the mountains," Dr. Talmage tells of his great anxiety 
concerning the new Tabernacle while it was building, concerning the acoustic 
properties. He says in that sermon: 

THE DIFFICULTY OF CONTROLLING AN ECHO 

" The hardest thing in this world to do is to stop an echo. Many an oration 
has been spoiled and many an orator confounded by an echo. Costly churches, 
cathedrals, theatres and music halls have been ruined by an echo. Architects 
have strung wires across auditoriums to arrest the echo. When our first Brook- 
lyn Tabernacle was being constructed, we were told by architects that it was of 
such a shape that the human voice could not be heard in it, or, if heard, it would 
be jangled into echoes. In state of worriment I went to Joseph Henry, the 
President of the Smithsonian Institute, at Washington, and told him of this 
evil prophecy, and he replied : ' I have probably experimented more with the 
laws of sound than any other man, and I have got as far as this; two buildings 
5 



66 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

may seem to be exactly alike and yet in one the acoustics may be good and in 
the other bad. Go on with your church building and trust that all will be well' 
And all was well." 

Although this Tabernacle was more than twice as large as the church from 
which they had moved, the congregations from the start more than filled it, and 
it was soon seen that this also was too small. 

THE PREACHER. AS A CITY MISSIONARY 

Dr. Talmage was a profound believer in the value of fresh air and exer- 
cise. He would go off for long walks, returning brightened and refreshed. He 
seldom told where he had been, but incidents were told by others which showed 
that even in his recreation he had been about his Master's business. One of 
these is related by Rev. J. C. Knox, of Rotterdam, N. Y., who heard the story 
in a mission on the East Side of New York City. A longshoreman rose to give 
his testimony in response to the leader's invitation to any present who might 
have a word to say about their own experience. The longshoreman was evi- 
dently an earnest and sincere Christian and told in vivid words the story of his 
conversion. He said he was working on the docks in Brooklyn and was some- 
what careless in his life. He was pretty regular in his attendance at the saloon 
and did not trouble the church a great deal. One day while he was loafing 
about between jobs a strange gentleman spoke to him about the weather and 
the work at the docks. The longshoreman liked his genial manner and they 
drifted into conversation. Very soon he told the stranger all about his way 
of life, and they were talking sociably when he was asked about the state of 
his soul. He confessed that he had not paid much attention to it, and he sup- 
posed that if he should die, it would be lost. The stranger seemed shocked and 
urged him to seek salvation through Christ, putting the case so forcibly that 
the longshoreman for the first time felt a longing to be a Christian. In a day or 
two the stranger came again and afterwards looked him up repeatedly. Finally 
the longshoreman could hold back no longer and gave himself to Christ. It 
was a real conversion and it held, filling the man's heart with joy, cleansing his 
life and making, as he said, a new man of him. One Sunday morning he went 
to the Tabernacle to hear Dr. Talmage preach. To his amazement, when the 
great preacher rose to open the service, he recognized him as the stranger who 
had visited him at the docks and had led him to Christ. 

THE SERMON SYNDICATE 

It was while he was in Brooklyn that the famous Sermon Syndicate was 
organized, which gave Dr. Talmage's sermons to the civilized globe, and brought 
him into simultaneous weekly contact with millions of readers here and abroad. 
Dr. Louis Klopsch, of New York, was the originator of the plan of a world- 
wide pulpit. In 1885 he syndicated the first Talmage sermon. The syndicate 



THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 67 

multiplied with amazing rapidity, until every State in the Union was fully rep- 
resented, and the sermons of the great preacher were printed in 3,000 news- 
papers, reaching 20,000,000 readers in the United States and Canada, and many 
even in Great Britain and Australia, besides being translated into the languages 
of over half a score of foreign countries. Since the world began, no man ever 
had so vast a pulpit. Of Wesley it was said that the world was his parish ; of 
Joseph Parker it has been remarked that " the front seats of his auditorium 
(the Temple, London) were in the Himalayas and the back seats in the Rockies ;" 
but of Dr. Talmage alone could it be said, in the language of the London Times, 
that ''the whole human race was his congregation/' His sermons touched every 
phase of human nature, and swept the heart-strings of men and women of 
every race. 

A WORLD-WIDE MINISTRY 

It is unquestionably true that, even without the Syndicate, which placed 
him on a world-wide plane, giving him all humanity as an audience, Dr. Tal- 
mage would still have been a great and popular preacher. But it is equally 
true that the greater fame and the wider usefulness which came to him as the 
result of that skilfully devised method of world-wide publicity, would have 
been almost wholly missed. It was this which contributed to a large extent 
to make him nationally and internationally famous, and to bring him into the 
closest spiritual relations with the Christian people of every land under the 
sun. Dr. Talmage knew this. He felt the debt of gratitude he owed to the 
public press, and he never failed to acknowledge it frankly and handsomely. 

While in his first Brooklyn pulpit, the charge was made against him that 
he was sensational in his manner of preaching. He did not deny it. He took 
the topics of the time — the gigantic evils of the day — and with all the force of 
his mighty vocabulary, he strove to compel public attention to the situation. 
His style of preaching was wholly his own, and it never failed to attract the 
multitude. Nor did the preacher ever fail to preach the Gospel ; for in all his 
crusades against iniquity, in whatever shape or form, he kept the Cross of Christ 
ever steadily in view, as the remedy for the world's wrongs. Once, in com- 
menting on his style of preaching, he said frankly : " My positive mode of 
preaching seems to stir the hostilities of all earth and hell." 

EXPLORING UNDERGROUND NEW YORK 

Some of the most stirring episodes of his eventful career occurred about 
this time. He himself related those experiences in these words : 

" Feeling called upon to explore underground New York City life, that I 
might report the evils to be combatted, I took with me two elders of my church 
and a New York Police Commissioner and a policeman, and I explored and 
reported the horrors that needed removal, and the allurements that endangered 
our young men. There came upon me an outburst of assumed indignation that 



68 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

frightened almost everybody but myself. That exploration put into my church 
thirty or forty newspaper correspondents, from north, south, east and west ; 
which opened for me new avenues in which to preach the Gospel that otherwise 
would never have been opened. I preached a series of sermons on amusements, 
and a false report of what I did say roused a violence that threatened me with 
poison and dirk and pistol and other forms of extinguishment, until the chief 
of the Brooklyn police, without any suggestion from me, took possession of 
the church with twenty-four policemen, to see that no harm was done." 

TRIAL AND VINDICATION 

It was inevitable that the publicity arising from such unusual activities 
should make Dr. Talmage a focus for many eyes whenever he preached. 
It also exposed him to the criticism of other ministers. In the spring of 1879 
the clerical disapproval of his methods culminated in the presentation of a series 
of charges against him before the Brooklyn Presbytery. Dr. Talmage was the 
kind of man who was liable to inadvertently furnish a technical basis for such 
charges. He was full of enthusiasm, and when he admired a man, or praised 
a movement, or condemned an outrage, he did so with all the vigor of his nature, 
and was not as careful as a more phlegmatic man would have been to verify 
his facts. A hostile critic therefore had no difficulty in pointing out verbal inac- 
curacies in his statements, and, if he were malignant, he could stigmatize them 
by a hard name. The charges dealt not only with his pulpit utterances, but 
with his editorial work, and they were pressed with a persistence that seemed to 
ordinary observers somewhat unbrotherly. The Presbytery listened patiently 
both to the attack and the defence, and at the close of the trial, voted to dismiss 
the charges. It also placed on record the resolution that : " Neither from Dr. 
Talmage's published sermons, nor from any other source, public or private, have 
we learned anything against his doctrinal soundness. Indeed, he might increase 
his popularity in some directions, did he not so boldly and persistently preach 
the old doctrines as formulated in our Confession and Catechism ; nor do we 
doubt that the truth which he preaches is instrumental in the salvation of 
souls." An appeal was taken from the decision of the Presbytery to the Synod, 
but nothing came of it. The kindliness and magnanimity of Dr. Talmage's 
manner toward his brethren who were accusing him was marked throughout 
the trial, and won for him the respect and esteem even of his opponents. It 
gratified him exceedingly when, some years afterwards, the leader of the attack, 
meeting him in the Bible House, cordially extended his hand in greeting and 
uttered a friendly expression of good-will, which Dr. Talmage heartily recipro- 
cated. 

THE FIRST CONFLAGRATION 

On a Sunday morning in December, 1872, Dr. Talmage looked from the 
window of his house and saw his beloved church in flames. It soon was onlv 






THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 69 

a smoking ruin. Undismayed by the destruction of their church, the congre- 
gation soon began to build a still larger structure. " The old one was never 
big enough anyway," said the pastor, cheerily, after the first shock had passed 
away. His optimism infected the congregation, and they immediately planned 
for a building to seat 5,000. Although the completed edifice was the largest 
church of its denomination in America, it was never large enough to hold the 
crowds who came to listen to the now famous preacher. The regular hearers 
alone were nearly sufficient to fill the building, and their number was augmented 
by hundreds from New York, by many from other States, and even by transat- 
lantic visitors, who had read his sermons printed in their home journals. For 
fully fifteen years the church had uninterrupted prosperity, which was rudely 
broken on October 13, 1889, by the complete destruction of the second tabernacle 
by fire. A third tabernacle was built still larger than its predecessors. It was 
finished in 1891, and its dedication was a great public occasion. Large delega- 
tions, drawn from every section of the Union, came, bringing hearty congrat- 

Uatl ° nS ' THE "RAINBOW" SERMON 

The writer of this went once to hear him preach at the Tabernacle on a 
very rainy morning. The water poured down, and he expected to see a small 
audience, and feared he would not see the great preacher at his best. But not- 
withstanding the rain, the vast Tabernacle was filled with people. The Doctor 
came on the platform, and for his Scripture lesson read first the account of the 
Flood. People turned to each other and smiled. But after he had read of the 
great storm that drowned the world, he turned over a little farther, and read 
# of the landing of the ark, and of God's pointing to the rainbow in the clouds, 
and of his promise connected with it. Then he turned to the Book of Revela- 
tion, and read of the " rainbow round about the throne." Pie closed the Bible, 
looked out over the great audience with a smiling face, and said, " There never 
was a black, dark rainstorm without a rainbow to follow. God never tells of 
a flood without telling of a rainbow. None of you will have a life so stormy 
but the rainbow will follow the storm, and I shall never preach to you about 
a storm without telling you also of the rainbow." 

How it cleared the air! It seemed to fill the room with sunshine. It lifted 
like magic every man's drooping spirits, and all the chill of the storm outside 
had disappeared. It was a little thing, you say, but it was the work of a genius. 
Only a great artist would have ever thought of it. It was characteristic of all 
Dr. Talmage's style in the pulpit. His style was unique because he imitated 
no one, and was not held in bondage by any fear of violating custom. He did 
not follow the fashion ; he made it. He was himself. He did more to set 
preachers free from slavish imitation of traditional pulpit style than any other 
man of his day. 

It is always interesting to inquire into thfe methods of a great artist in any 
department of human effort, and it is exceedingly interesting to know how 



70 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

Dr. Talmage prepared for those remarkable discourses which, week after week, 
for so many years, reached the ears and the eyes, as well as the hearts of more 
people than was ever reached by any other man in the history of the world. For- 
tunately we have such information in his own unique language. 

NEWSPAPER. ATTACK 

Dr. Talmage was interviewed on this subject, and he talked very freely con- 
cerning his ministry. One question asked of the Doctor was: '"What was 
it that led the daily and weekly newspapers throughout the country to begin 
publishing your sermons ? " 

" It came about in a remarkable and significant manner,'' said Dr. Talmage. 
" During my pastorate in Brooklyn a certain group of preachers began to slander 
me, and to say all manner of lies about me; I suppose because they were jealous 
of my success. Their accusations were published in every important news- 
paper in the country. The result was that the Xew York correspondents of 
the leading papers in the chief cities of the United States came to my church 
on Sundays expecting I would make counter attacks which would be good news. 
I never said a word in reply with the exception of a single paragraph, during 
an entire year. The correspondents were after news, and failing to get the 
sensational charges, they took down the sermons and sent them to their papers. 
Thus my audiences were increased ten-thousandfold and the Gospel was pro- 
claimed to countless numbers who never darkened church doors. The sermons 
seemed to please the readers, and the weekly press lias continued the practice 
of publishing them until the present, while thousands of others have made them 
a regular feature, until now it is estimated that they appear weekly in thousands 
of periodicals throughout America. Europe and Asia, and that the number of 
weekly readers is about 20,000,000." 

SERMONIC PREPARATION 

" May I ask your method of preparing your sermons ? " 
" I will be glad to tell you," he answered. " Having first prepared the 
subject under consideration as far as I can. I call in my stenographer and dic- 
tate to him. As I dictate the sermon so I deliver it on Sunday, but do not feel 
bound to limit myself to the previously dictated version. My best days for work 
are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I brood over the subject, and read a great deal on 
the topic, but do most of my work while walking. I jot down notes in a little book. 
Sometimes I write out the point to be made for when things are not very clear. I 
find nothing defines an obscure subject as well as a pen. If a man doesn't use a 
pen he becomes verbose. What would occupy two or three pages of dictation can 
be composed by pen into an epigram or garlanded into a metaphor. But I feel 
that one's ease in preparing sermons lies a great deal in having his work way 
ahead. For example, last week I finished a sermon on a subject that I had pre- 
pared all the material for fifteen years ago. 



THE BROOKLYN PASTORATE 71 

" I have found that there is hardly anything one knows that does not some- 
time come into play. I think if this fact of the value of miscellaneous informa- 
tion were more generally recognized it would be far better. I have a lot of old 
patent office reports that in certain moods I take up, and they are very suggestive. 
Books are locomotives that start the train of thought. A man may read a chap- 
ter that will unfold his thoughts in directions that are new and very important. 
Let me give you an example of the value of both general reading and prepara- 
tion far in advance. Fifteen years ago I was sitting one day on the piazza of 
the Felix Hotel, in Lexington, Kentucky. A gentleman said to me : ' What do 
you think of the coming sermon ? ' I had recently been reading Dr. Cummings 
on the prophecies. That suggested to me the twentieth century sermon, and I 
preached it three weeks ago." 

" What was the nature of your first sermon ? " 

" It was over-illustrated," he replied. " Illustrations are as natural to me 
as breathing. It has always been the question with me how to get rid of illustra- 
tions. I naturally think in metaphor. When I preached my first sermon I could 
analyze a subject as well as now. Even to-day I find my earliest analyses of texts 
very useful. Some things are born in us and other things come by elaborate and 
hard study." 

" In view of your remarkable power over an audience, Dr. Talmage, would 
you object to telling where you studied elocution and style? " 

THREE LESSONS IN ELOCUTION 

" I never took but three lessons in elocution in my life," said the Doctor. 
" With that exception all the training I secured was in a grammar school, where 
a young fellow and myself went out in the woods and trained the volume of our 
voices. When a boy I had a rather weak voice, but later in life I could easily speak 
to 4,000 or 5,000 people in the open air. Nor have I had any training in style. 
To speak in metaphor is natural with me. I use it in conversation as well as in 
the pulpit. And I find that the majority of people understand this figure of speech 
better than any other." 

" What is the kind of preaching needed to-day and what should be the train- 
ing of young ministers ? " 

" The only kind of preaching that reaches the heart of the world is the sym- 
pathetic and the helpful. The preacher should start out with the idea of helping- 
somebody. Everybody wants help, except a fool. All have needs and infirmities. 
Tell me how many people there are in an audience and I will tell you how many 
people need help." 

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS 

These answers give us a key to the secret of two great causes for the growth 
and permanence of Dr. Talmage's hold on the people throughout the world. 
His sermons were healthful. They were purposely so. He thought of the world 



72 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



as tired, and sick, and heart-broken, and he sought to point the weary to the 
place of rest. He spoke to the troubled heart about peace. He told the sick of 
the Great Physician. He made the sympathy of God very real to the tried and 
perplexed. He preached the Gospel of Good Cheer. He looked at men and at 
human life from God's side, and that is always the bright side. Men loved to 
hear him, and delighted to read his sermons because there was in them a note 
of good cheer, a touch of human sympathy, the grip of a friendly and helpful 
hand. 

Then, too, the " common people heard him gladly." and remained true to 
him because he maintained an unshaken faith in God and in the final salvation 
of the world. He believed with all his heart that God was stronger than the devil, 
and that in the great contest between good and evil, the good would be trium- 
phant. Men do not flock to hear doubts and fears. The multitudes of the city 
went out to hear John the Baptist because he believed something, and believed it 
with all his might. He was no reed shaken with the wind ; he was a man with a 
backbone like steel. So one of the great causes of Talmage's permanent hold on 
the mind and heart of humanity was his continued and unwavering faith in God ; 
his devotion to the Bible as the chart of human life; his faith in Jesus Christ as 
the divine Son of God, and the only Saviour of the world ; his faith in the suffi- 
ciency of the atonement of Christ's blood, and his hope and trust that the devil 
was a defeated enemy, and that Christ would yet have all his enemies under his 
feet, and reign as King of kings and Lord of lords. It was this faith, always 
boldly declared, never dallied with, or mumbled over, or in any way covered up, 
but always preached with an earnestness and a clearness that caused it to shine 
out bright as the sun, that made Dr. Talmage, to the last day of his life, the great 
preacher for the common people of every English-speaking land. 













Mm 

it ^^tfC^'spr 




THE MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION 

DR. TALMAGE's OWN GRAPHIC STORY OE HIS DESCENT INTO THE INEERNO OE 
SOCIAL VICE AND WHAT HE SAW THERE — A TERRIBLY REALISTIC PICTURE OE 
THE SINS OE MODERN SOCIETY 



N a previous chapter we have already alluded to the sensation that was 
caused not only in New York and Brooklyn, but among thoughtful 
men and women throughout the whole country by Dr. Talmage's un- 
masking of the hideous vices of modern society. It was during his 
Brooklyn pastorate that he undertook this " Midnight Exploration." 
Escorted by police he went into the gambling dens, the low resorts, 
the vaudevilles and immoral playhouses, and the places frequented by the 
votaries of pleasure and sinful dissipation. What he saw there he told in plain, 
unvarnished words, concealing nothing and setting before the world, in unmis- 
takable terms, the facts of its own infamy. It was a revelation that stunned 
the millions who watched for every word that fell from the lips of the Taber- 
nacle pastor. 

But we will let him tell the story in his own unique language, which is as 
true and pertinent to-day as it was when he wrote it. It is an essential part of 
his own life — an autobiographical section which no other pen can relate so well 
as his own. 

IN INIQUITY'S HAUNTS 

" Brought up in the country and surrounded by much parental care, I had 
not yet seen the haunts of iniquity. By the grace of God defended, I had never 
sowed any ' wild oats.' I had somehow been able to tell, from various sources, 
something about the iniquities of the great cities, and to preach against them ; 
but I saw, in the destruction of a great multitude of the people, that there must 
be an infatuation and a temptation that had never been spoken about, and I 
said, ' I will explore.' I saw tens of thousands of men going down, and if there 
had been a spiritual percussion answering to the physical percussion, the whole 
air would have been full of the rumble and roar of the demolition ; and this mo- 
ment, if we should pause in our service, we would hear the crash, crash ! Just 
as in the sickly season you sometimes hear the bell at the gate of a cemeterv 
ringing almost incessantly, so I found that the bell at the gate of the cemetery 

n 



74 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



where lost souls are buried was tolling by day and tolling by night. I said, ' I 
will explore.' I went as a physician goes into a smallpox hospital, or a fever 
lazaretto, to see what practical and useful information I might get. That would 
be a foolish doctor who would stand outside the door of an invalid, writing a 
Latin prescription. When the lecturer in a medical college is done with his 
lecture he takes the students into the dissecting room, and he shows them the 
reality. I am here this morning to report a plague, and to tell you how sin cor- 
rupts the body and befouls the mind and ruins the soul. 

HIS POLICE ESCORT 

" ' Oh,' say you, ' are you not afraid that in consequence of your explora- 
tion of the iniquities of the city other persons may make exploration and do 
themselves damage?' I reply: ' If, in company with the Commissioner of Po- 
lice, and the Inspector of Police, and the Captain of Police, and the company 
of two Christian gentlemen, and not with the spirit of curiosity, but that you 
may sin in order the better to combat it, then, in the name of the eternal God. 
go ! But, if not, then stay away.' Wellington, during 1 the battle of Water- 
loo when the bullets were buzzing around his head, saw a civilian on the field. 
He said to him: ' Sir, what are you doing here? Be off ! ' ' Why,' replied the 
civilian, ' there is no more danger here for me than there is for you.' Then 
Wellington flushed up and said : ' God and my country demand that I be here, 







I\l7: 




A TYPICAL MUSIC HALL AND BEER GARDEN 



THE MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION 75 

but you have no errand here.' Now, I, as an officer in the army of Jesus 
Christ, went on this exploration, and on to this battlefield. If you bear a like 
commission, go ; if not, stay away. 

" But you say, k Do you not think that somehow your description of these 
places will induce people to go and see for themselves? ' I answer: ' Yes; just 
as much as the description of the yellow fever at Granada would induce people 
to go down there and get the pestilence.' It was told us there were hardly 
enough people alive to bury the dead, and I am going to tell you a story in 
these Sabbath morning sermons of places where they are all dead or dying. 
And I shall not gild iniquities. I shall play a dirge and not an anthem ; and 
while I shall not put faintest blush on fairest cheek, I will kindle the cheeks of 
many a man into a conflagration, and I will make his ears tingle. 

THE START 

" But you say, ' Do you not know that the papers are criticising you for 
the position you take ? ' I say, ' Yes ; and do you know how I feel about it ? 
There is no man who is more indebted to the newspaper press than I am. My 
business is to preach the truth, and the wider the audience the newspaper press 
gives me, the wider my field is. As the secular and religious press of the United 
States, and the Canadas, and of England, and Ireland, and Scotland, and Austra- 
lia and New Zealand are giving me every week millions of souls for an audience. 
I say I am indebted to the press, anyhow.' Go on ! To the day of my death I 
cannot pay them what I owe them. 

" It was ten o'clock of a calm, clear starlight night when the carriage rolled 
with us from the bright part of the city down into the region where gambling 
and crime and death hold high carnival. When I speak of houses of dissipa- 
tion, I do not refer to one sin, or five sins, but to all sins. As the horses halted, 
and, escorted by the officers of the law, we w T ent in, we moved into a world of 
which I was as practically ignorant as though it had swung as far oft' from us as 
Mercury is from Saturn. No shout of revelry, no guffaw of laughter, but com- 
parative silence. Not many signs of death, but the dead were there. As I 
moved through this place I said, ' This is the home of lost souls.' It was a 
Dante's Inferno; nothing to stir the mirth, but many things to fill the eyes with 
tears of pity. Ah ! there were moral corpses. There were corpses on the stair- 
way, corpses in the gallery, corpses in the gardens. Leper met leper, but no 
bandaged mouth kept back the breath. I felt that I was sitting on the iron 
coast against which euroclydon had driven a hundred dismasted hulks — every 
moment more blackened hulks rolling in. And while I stood and waited for 
the going down of the storm and the lull of the sea, I bethought myself, this is 
an everlasting storm, and these billows always rage, and on each carcass that 
strewed the beach already had alighted a vulture — the long-beaked, filthy vul- 
ture of unending despair — now picking into the corruption, and now on the 



7 6 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



black wing wiping the blood of a soul ! No lark, no robin, no chaffinch ; but 
vultures, vultures, vultures ! The scene reminded me of an incident that had 
occurred a few weeks previously in Pennsylvania, where a naturalist had re- 
ceived from a friend a deadly serpent, and he put it in a bottle and stood it in 
his studio ; and one evening, while in the studio with his daughter, a bat flew in 
at the window, extinguished the light, struck the bottle containing the deadly 
serpent, and in a few moments there was a shriek from_ the daughter, and in a 
few hours she was dead. She had been bitten of the serpent. Amid these, 
haunts of death, in that midnight exploration I saw that there were lions and 

eagles and doves for insignia; but I 

thought of myself how inappropriate. 

Better the insignia of an adder and a 

bat. 

THE COARSENESS OF VICE 

" First of all I have to report, as 
a result of this midnight exploration, 
riiat all the pulpit rhetoric about 
the costly magnificence of the haunts 
of iniquity is apocryphal. We were 
shown what was called the costliest 
and most magnificent specimen. I 
had often heard that the walls were 
adorned with masterpieces ; that the 
fountains were bewitching in the gas- 
light ; that the music was like the 
touch of a Thalberg or a Gottschalk ; 
that the upholstery was imperial ; 
that the furniture in some places was 
like the throne-room of the Tuile- 
ries. It is all false. Masterpieces ! 
There was not a painting worth five 
dollars apart from the frame. Great 
daubs of color that no intelligent 
mechanic would put on his wall. A 
cross-breed between a chromo and 
a splash of poor paint ! Music ! Some of the homeliest creatures I ever saw 
squawked discord, accompanied by pianos out of tune. Upholstery! Two 
characteristics — red and cheap. You have heard so much about the won- 
derful lights — blue, and green, and yellow, and orange, flashing across the 
dancers and the gay groups. Seventy-five cents' worth of chemicals would 
produce that in one night. Tinsel, gewgaws, tawdriness, frippery, seemingly 




ONUY A DRUNKARD! 



THE MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION yy 

much of it bought at a second-hand furniture store and never paid for ! For 
the most part, the inhabitants were repulsive. Here and there a soul on whom 
God had put the crown of beauty, but nothing comparable with the Christian 
loveliness and purity which you may see any pleasant afternoon on any of the 
thoroughfares of our great cities. 

THE DEGRADATION OF MUSIC 

" I noticed in all the haunts of dissipation that there was an attempt at 
music, however poor. The door swung open and shut to music ; they stepped 
to music, they danced to music, they attempted nothing without music, and I 
said to myself, ' If such inferior music has such power, and drum and fife and 
orchestra are enlisted in the service of the devil, what multipotent power there 
must be in music ! and is it not high time that in all our churches and reform 
associations we tested how much charm there is in it to bring men off the 
wrong road to the right road ? ' Twenty times that night I said within myself, 
' If poor music is so powerful in a bad direction, why cannot good music be 
made almost omnipotent in a good direction?' Oh, my friends, we want to 
drive men into the kingdom of God with a musical staff. We want to shut off 
the path of death with a musical bar. We want to snatch all the musical instru- 
ments from the service of the devil, and with organ, and cornet, and bass viol, 
and piano, and orchestra praise the Lord. Oh, holy bewilderment ! Let us 
send such men as Philip Phillips, the Christian vocalist, all around the world, 
and Arbuckle, the cornetist, with his ' Robin Adair ' set to Christian words, 
and George Morgan, with his Hallelujah Chorus, and ten thousand Christian 
men with uplifted hosannas to capture this whole earth for God. We have had 
enough minor strains in the church ; give us major strains. We have had 
enough dead marches in the church ; play us those tunes which are played when 
an army is on a dead run to overtake an enemy. Give us the double-quick. 
We are in full gallop of cavalry charge. Forward, the whole line ! 

COUNTRY [BOYS LED ASTRAY 

" But I have also to report of that midnight exploration, that I saw some- 
thing that amazed me more than I can tell. I do not want to tell it, for it will 
take pain to many hearts far away, and I cannot comfort them. But I must 
tell it. In all these haunts of iniquity I found young men with the ruddy color 
of country health on their cheek, evidently just come to town for business, hav- 
ing obtained employment in our stores and shops and offices. They had helped 
gather the summer grain. There they were in haunts of iniquity, the look on 
their cheek which is never on the cheek except when there has been hard work 
on the farm and in the open air. Here were these young men who had heard 
how gaily a boat dances on the edge of a maelstrom, and they were venturing. 
O God! will a few weeks do such an awful work for a young man? O Lord! 



;8 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

hast thou forgotten what occurred when they knelt at the family altar that 
morning when that young man came away, and how father's voice trembled 
in the prayer, and mother and sister sobbed as they knelt on the floor"'' I saw 
that young man when he first confronted evil. I saw it was his first night there. 
I saw on his face a defiant look, as much as to say: ' I am mightier than sin/ 
I saw him consort with iniquity. Then I saw him waver and doubt. Then I 
saw going over his countenance the shadow of sad reflections, and I knew from 
his looks there was a powerful memory stirring his soul. I think there was a 
whisper going out from the gaudy upholstery, saying, ' My son, go home.' I 
think there was a hand stretched out from under the curtains — a hand tremulous 
with anxiety, a hand that had been worn with work, a hand partly wrinkled with 
age, that seemed to beckon him away, and so goodness and sin seemed to 
struggle in that young man's soul; but sin triumphed, and he surrendered to 
darkness and to death — an ox to the slaughter. 

A TIMELY WARNING 

"Oh, my soul! is this the end of all the good advice? Is this the end of 
all the prayers that have been made? God pity the country lad. unsuspecting 
and easily betrayed. O young man from the farmhouse among the lulls, what 
have your parents done that you should do this against them? Why are you 
bent on killing with trouble her who gave you birth ? Look at her fingers 
— what makes them so distorted? Working for you. Do you prefer to that 
honest old face the beroughed cheek of sin? Write home to-morrow morning 
by the first mail, cursing your mother's white hair, cursing her stooped shoulder, 
cursing her old armchair, cursing the cradle in which she rocked you. ' Oh,' 
you say, ' I can't, I can't ! ' You are doing it already. There is something on 
your hands, on your forehead, on your feet. It is red. What is it? The 
blood of a mother's broken heart ! When you were threshing the harvest 
apples from that tree at the corner of the field last summer, did you think you 
would ever come to this? Did you think that the sharp sickle of death would 
cut you down so soon? If I thought I could break the infatuation I would 
come down from the pulpit and throw my arms around you and beg you to stop. 

A WOMAN'S FACE 

" I have not told you of all the kinds of people I saw in the haunts of 
iniquity. Before I get through I will answer the question everywhere asked 
of me, why does municipal authority allow these haunts of iniquity? But I 
was going to tell you of an incident. I said to the officer : ' Well, let us go : I 
am tired of this scene ;' and as we passed out of the haunts of iniquity into the 
fresh air, a soul passed in. What a face that was ! Sorrow only half covered 
up with an assumed joy. It was a woman's face I saw the tragedy as plainly 



THE MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION 



79 



as on the page of a book. You know that there is such a thing as somnambu- 
lism, or walking in one's sleep. Well, in a fatal somnambulism, a soul started 
off from her father's house. It was very dark, and her feet were cut of the 
rocks ; but on she went until she came to the verge of a chasm, and she began 
to descend from boulder to boulder down over the rattling shelving — for you 
know while walking in sleep people will go where they dare not go when 
awake. Farther on down, and farther, where no owl of the night or hawk of 
the day would venture. On down until she touched the depth of the chasm. 
Then, in walking sleep, she began to 
ascend the other side of the chasm, 
rock above rock, as the roe bound- 
eth. Without having her head to 
swim with the awful steep, she scaled 
the height. 

ON THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS 
" No eye but the sleepless eye of 
God watched her as she went down 
one side the chasm and came up the 
other side the chasm. It was an 
August night, and a storm was gath- 
ering, and a loud burst of thunder 
awoke her from her somnambulism, 
and she said: 'Whither shall I fly?' 
and with an affrighted eye she looked 
back upon the chasm she had crossed, 
and she looked in front, and there 
was a deeper chasm before her. She 
said : ' What shall I do ? Must I die 
here?' And as she bent over the one 
chasm, she heard the sigh'ng of the 
past; and as she bent over the other 
chasm she heard the portent of the 
future. Then she sat down on the 
granite crag, and cried : ' Oh, for my 




PITCHED OUT 0£ THE GROGSHOP 



father's house ! Oh, for the cottage, where I might die amid embowering honey- 
suckles ! Oh, the past! Oh, the future ! O father! O mother! O God! But 
the storm that had been gathering culminated, and wrote with fingers of light- 
ning on the sky just above the horizon : ' The way of the transgressor is hard. 5 
And then thunder-peal after thunder-peal uttered it : ' Which forsaketh the guide 
of her youth and forgetteth the covenant of her God. Destroyed without rem- 
edy ! ' And the cavern behind her echoed it : ' Destroyed without remedy! ' And 
the chasm before echoed it : ' Destroyed without remedy ! ' There she perished 



8o T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

her cut and bleeding feet on the edge of one chasm, her long locks washed of 
the storm dripping over the other chasm. 

" But by this time our carriage had reached the curbstone at my dwelling, 
and I awoke, and behold it was a dream ! 

A CHURCH COMPANION 

" In addition to my police escort on my next exploration, I asked two eld- 
ers of the church to accompany me; not because they were any better than the 
other elders of the church, but because we were going into places where murder 
is sometimes done and where violent assault is frequent : and these elders were 
more muscular, and I was resolved that in any case where anything more than 
spiritual defense was necessary, to refer the whole matter to their hands. I __ 
believe in muscular Christianity. I wish that our theological seminaries, in- 
stead of sending out so many men with dyspepsia and liver complaint and all 
out of breath by the time they have climbed to the top of the pulpit stairs, 
would, through gymnasiums and other means, send into the pulpit physical 
giants as well as spiritual athletes. I do wish I could consecrate to the Lord 
two hundred and fifty pounds of avoirdupois weight. But, borrowing the 
strength of others, I started out on the midnight exploration. 

WEALTHY SINNERS 

" I noticed in my midnight exploration with these high officials that the 
haunts of sin are chiefly supported by men of rank and men of wealth. The 
voting men recently come from the country are on small salary, and they have 
but little money to spend in sin; and if they go into luxurious iniquity the em- 
ployer finds it out by the inflamed eye and the marks of dissipation, and they 
are discharged. The luxurious places of iniquity are supported by men who 
come down from the fashionable avenues of Xew York, and cross over from 
some of the finest mansions of Brooklyn. Prominent business men from Bos- 
ton, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cincinnati patronize these places of crime. I 
could call the names of prominent men in our cluster of cities who patronize 
these places of iniquity. Some of these wretches are judges of courts, distin- 
guished lawyers, officers of the church, political orators standing on Republi- 
can and Democratic and Greenback platforms, talking about God and good 
morals, until you might suppose them to be evangelists expecting a thousand 
converts in one night. Call the roll of dissipation in the haunts of iniquity any 
night, and if the inmates will answer, you will find there stock-brokers from 
Wall Street, large importers from Broadway, iron merchants, leather mer- 
chants, cotton merchants, hardware merchants, wholesale grocers, representa- 
tives from all the commercial and wealthy classes. 

" We have been talking so much about the Gospel for the masses; now let 
us talk a little about the Gospel for the lepers of society, for the millionaire sots, 



THE MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION 81 

for the portable lazarettos of upper-tendom. It is the iniquity that comes down 
from the higher circles of society that supports the haunts of crime, and it is 
gradually turning our cities into Sodoms and Gomorrahs waiting for the fire- 
and-brimstone tempest of the Lord God who whelmed the cities of the plain. 
We want about five hundred Anthony Comstocks to go forth and explore and 
expose the abominations of high life. 

A TYPICAL DEN 

" For eight or ten years there stood within sight of the most fashionable 
New York drive, a Moloch temple, a brownstone hell on earth, which neither 
the Mayor, nor the judges, nor the police dared to touch, when Anthony Corn- 
stock, a Christian man, with cheek scarred by the knife of a desperado whom 
he had arrested, walked into that palace of the debauched on Fifth avenue, and 
in the name of God put an end to it, the priestess presiding at the orgies re- 
treating by suicide into the lost world, her bleeding corpse found in her own 
bath-tub. 

" May the eternal God have mercy on our cities ! Gilded sin comes 
down from those high places into the upper circles of iniquity, and then on 
gradually down, until in five years it makes the whole pilgrimage, from the 
apartment with marble pillars on the brilliant avenue clear down to the cellars 
of Water Street. The officer on that midnight exploration said to me : ' Look 
at them now, and look at them three years from now when all this glory has de- 
parted ; they'll be a heap of rags in the station house.' Another of the officers 
said to me : ' That is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families on Madison 
Square.' 

" But I have something more amazing to tell you than that the men of 
rank and wealth support these haunts of iniquity, and that is, that they are 
chiefly supported by heads of families — fathers and husbands, with the awful 
perjury of broken marriage vows upon them, with a niggardly stipend left at 
home for the support of their families, going forth to squander their thou- 
sands for the diamonds and wardrobe and equipage of iniquity. Let such men 
be hurled out of this public iniquity. Let such men be hurled out of decent 
circles. Let them be hurled out from business circles. If they will not repent, 
overboard with them ! 

ROTTENNESS OF SOCIETY 

ic There must be a reform in this matter, or American society will go to 
pieces. Under the head of ' incompatibility of temper,' nine-tenths of the 
abomination goes on. What did you get married for if your dispositions are 
incompatible? ' Oh! ' you say, ' I rushed into it without thought.' Then you 
ought to be willing to suffer the punishment for making a fool of yourself! 
Incompatibility of temper ! You are responsible for at least a half of the incom- 
6 



82 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



patibility. Why are you not honest and willing to admit either that you did not 
control your temper, or that you had already broken your marriage oath? In 
nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand, incompatibility is a 
phrase to cover up wickedness already committed. I declare in the presence of 
this city and in the presence of the world, that heads of families are supporting 
these haunts of iniquity. I wish there might be a police raid lasting a great 
while, that they would just go down through all these places of sin and gather 
up all the prominent business men of the city and march them down through 
the streets, followed by about twenty reporters to take their names and put 
them in full capitals in the next day's paper ! Let such a course be undertaken 




SUNDAY MORNING CASKS IN THE} FAMOUS NEW YORK TOMBS COURT 

in our cities, and in six months there would be eighty per cent, off your public 
crime. It is not now* the young men and the boys that need so much looking 
after; it is their fathers. Eet heads of families cease to patronize places of 
iniquity, and in a short time they would crumble to ruin. 



WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE 

" You press me with the question : ' Why do not the public authorities of 
New York extirpate these haunts of iniquity?' Before I give you a definite 
answer I want to say that the obstacles in that city are greater than in any 
city on this continent. It is so vast. It is the landing-place of European immi- 



MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION 83 

gration. Its wealth is mighty to establish and defend places of iniquity. Twice 
a year there are incursions of people from all parts of the land, coming on for 
the spring and the fall trade. It requires twenty times the municipal energy 
to keep order in New York that it does in any city from Portland to San Fran- 
cisco. But you still pursue me with the question, and I am to answer it by 
telling you that there is infinite fault and immensity of blame to be divided be- 
tween three parties. 

CRIME AND THE POLICE 

" First, the police of New York City. So far as I know them they are 
courteous gentlemen. They have had great discouragement, they tell me, in 
the fact that when they arrest criminals and bring them before the courts the 
witnesses will not appear, lest they criminate themselves. They tell me also 
that they have been discouraged by the fact that so many suits have been 
brought against them for damages. But after all, my friends, they must take 
their share of blame. I have come to the conclusion, after much research and 
investigation, that there are captains of police in New York who are in com- 
plicity with crime — men who make thousands of dollars a year for the simple 
fact that they will not tell, and will permit places of iniquity to stand month 
after month, and year after year. I am told that there are captains of police in 
New York who get a percentage on every bottle of wine sold in the haunts o£ 
death, and that they get a revenue from all the shambles of sin. What a state of 
things this is ! There are between five and six hundred dens of darkness in the 
city of New York, where there are two thousand five hundred policemen. Not 
long ago there was a masquerade ball, in which the masculine and feminine 
offenders of society were the participants, and some of the police danced in the 
masquerade and distributed the prizes ! There is now open the grandest oppor- 
tunity that has ever opened for an American. It is for the man in high 
official position who shall get into his "stirrups and say : ' Men, follow ! ' and who 
shall in one night sweep around and take all of these leaders of iniquity, whether 
on suspicion or on positive proof, saying : ' I will take the responsibility ; come 
on ! I put my private property and my political aspirations and my life into 
this crusade against the powers of darkness.' That man would be Mayor of 
the city of New York. That man would be fit to be President of the United 
States. 

CHRISTIAN AMERICA TO BLAME 

" But part of the blame, and the heaviest part of it, I put on the moral and 
Christian people of our cities, who are guilty of most culpable indifference on 
this whole subject. When Tweed stole his millions, large audiences were 
assembled in indignation, Charles O'Connor was retained, committees of safety 
and investigation were appointed, and a great stir made ; but night by night 
there is a theft and a burglary of city morals as much worse than Tweed's rob- 



84 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

beries as his were worse than common shoplifting, and it has very little oppo- 
sition. I tell you what New York wants : it wants indignation meetings in 
Cooper Institute and Academy of Music and Chickering and Irving Halls to 
compel the public authorities to do their work, and to send the police, with 
clubs and lanterns ancl revolvers to turn off the colored lights of the dance- 
houses, and to mark for confiscation the trunks and wardrobes and furniture 
and scenery, and to gather up all the keepers and all the inmates and all the 
patrons, and march them out to the Tombs, fife and drum sounding the Rogues' 

March. 

FORSAKEN HOMES 

" I want to have one word with a class of men with whom people have so 
little patience that they never get a kind word of invitation. I mean the men 
who have forsaken their homes. O my brother, return. You say : ' 1 cannot ; 
I have no home ; my home is broken up.' Re-establish your home. It has 
been done in other cases, why may it not be done in your case ? 4 Oh,' you 
say, ' we parted for life ; we have divided our property ; we have divided our 
effects.' I ask you, did you divide the marriage ring of that bright day when 
you started life together? Did you divide your family Bible? If so, where did 
you divide it? Across the Old Testament, where the Ten Commandments 
denounce your sin ; or across the New Testament, where Christ says : ' Blessed 
are the pure in heart?' Or did you divide it between the Old and the New 
Testaments, right across the family record of weddings and births and deaths? 
Did you divide the cradle in which you rocked your first-born ? Did you divide 
the little grave in the cemetery, over which you stood with linked arms, look- 
ing down in awful bereavement? Above all, I ask you, did you divide your 
hope for heaven, so that there is no full hope left for either of you ? Go back ! 
There may be a great gulf between you and one happy domesticity ; but Christ 
will bridge that gulf. It may be a bridge of sighs. Turn toward it. Put your 
foot on the overarching span. Hear it ! It is a voice unrolling from the 
throne: ' He that overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be unto him a 
God, and he shall be my son ; but the unbelieving, and the sorcerers, and the 
whoremongers, and the adulterers, and the idolaters, and all liars shall have 
their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone — which is the sec- 
ond death ! ' " 




THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 

THE RETURNED MAGDALEN — A VISIT TO THE PURLIEUS 01? DEATH — DEBRIS OF" RUINED 
HOMES — HORRORS 01? THE TENEMENTS — " IS THAT TALMAGE?" — THE TWO 
ANGELS — IN A DEN OE THIEVES — BLACKMAILERS AND SOCIAL OUTCASTS — THE 
CITIES TO BE REDEEMED. 



COLD winter night in a city church. It is Christmas night. They 
have been decorating the sanctuary. A lost wanderer of the street, 
with thin shawl about her, attracted by the warmth and light, 
comes in and sits near the door. The minister of religion is 
preaching of Him who was wounded for our transgressions and 
bruised for our iniquities, and the poor soul by the door said : 
' Why, that must mean me ; " mercy for the chief of sinners ; bruised for our 
iniquities ; wounded for our transgressions." The music that night in the 
sanctuary brought back the old hymn which she used to sing when, with father 
and mother, she worshiped God in the village church. The service over, the 
minister went down the aisle. She said to him, ' Were those words for me ? 
"Wounded for our transgressions." Was that for me?' The man of God 
understood her not. He knew not how to comfort a shipwrecked soul, and he 
passed on and he passed out. 

A LIGHT IN THE WINDOW 

" The poor wanderer followed into the street. ' What are you doing here, 
Meg? ' said the police. 'What are you doing here to-night?' 'Oh/ she replied, 
' 1 was in to warm myself / and then the rattling cough came, and she held to the 
railing until the paroxysm was over. She passed on down the street, falling from 
exhaustion ; recovering herself again, until after a while she reached the outskirts 
of the city, and passed on into the country road. It seemed so familiar; she 
kept on the road, and she saw in the distance a light in the window. Ah ! that 
light had been gleaming there every night since she went away. Along that 
country road she passed until she came to the garden gate. She opened it, and 
passed up the path where she played in childhood. She came to the steps and 
looked in at the fire on the hearth. Then she put her fingers to the latch. Oh, if 
that door had been locked, she would have perished on the threshold, for she was 



86 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



near to death ! But that door had not been locked since the time she went away. 
She pushed open the door. She went in and lay down on the hearth by the 
fire. The old house-dog growled as he saw her enter, but there was something 
in the voice he recognized, and he frisked about her until he almost pushed her 
down in his joy. 

IN A MOTHERS ARMS 

" In the morning the mother came down, and she saw a bundle of rags on 
the hearth; but when the face was uplifted, she knew it, and it was no more old 

Meg of the street. Throwing her arms 
around the returned prodigal, she 
cried, 'Oh, Maggie!' The child 
threw her arms around her mother's 
neck, and said, ' Oh, mother ! ' and 
while they were embraced a rugged 
form towered above them. It was the 
father. The severity all gone out of 
his face, he stooped and took her up 
tenderly and carried her to mother's 
room, and laid her down on mother's 
bed, for she was dying. Then the lost 
one, looking up into her mother's face, 
said, ' Wounded for our transgressions 
and bruised for our iniquities ! Mother, 
do you think that means me?' ' Oh, 
yes, my darling,' said the mother. ' If 
mother is so glad to get you back, 
don't you think God is glad to get you 
back ? ' And there she lay dying, and 
all her dreams and all her prayers were 
filled with the words, ' Wounded for 
our transgressions, bruised for our 
iniquities,' until, just before the mo- 
ment of her departure, her face lighted 
up, showing the pardon of God had 
dropped upon her soul. And there she 
slept away on the bosom of a pardoning Jesus. So the Lord took back one whom 
the world rejected. 

THE PURLIEUS OF DEATH 

" Standing within those purlieus of death, under the conduct of the police 
and in their company, I was as much surprised at the people whom I missed as at 
the people whom I saw. I saw bankers there, and brokers there, and merchants 
there, and men of all classes and occupations who have leisure, there ; but there was 




THE VOICES OF THE STREET 



THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 87 

one class of persons that I missed. I looked for them all up and down the 
galleries, and amid the illumined gardens, and all up and down the staircases of 
death. 

" I saw not one of them. I mean the hard-working classes, the laboring 
classes, of our great cities. You tell me they could not afford to go there. They 
mind to ; but the simple fact is that hard work is a friend to good morals. The 
men who toil from early morning until late at night are tired out when they go 
home and want to sit down and rest, or to saunter out with their families along 
the street, or to pass into some quiet place of amusement where they will not be 
ashamed to take wife or daughter. 

THE BUSY MEN ARE MORAL MEN 

" The busy populations of these cities are the moral populations. I observed 
on the night of our exploration that the places of dissipation are chiefly supported 
by the men who go to business at nine and ten o'clock in the morning and get 
through at three and four in the afternoon. They have plenty of time to go to 
destruction in, and plenty of money to buy a through ticket on the Grand Trunk 
Railroad to perdition, stopping at no station until they get to the eternal smash- 
up ! Those are the fortunate and divinely-blessed young men who have to break- 
fast early and take supper late, and have the entire interregnum filled up with 
work that blisters the hands, and makes the legs ache and the brain weary. There 
is no chance for the morals of that young man who has plenty of money and no 
occupation. 

[ESCAPING THE SNARE 

'' You may go through all our great cities and you will not find one young 
man of that kind who has not already achieved his ruin, or who is not on the way 
thereto at the rate of sixty miles an hour. Give the young man plenty of wines, 
and plenty of cigars, and plenty of fine horses, and Satan has no anxiety about 
that man's coming out at his place. He ceases to watch him, only giving direc- 
tions about his reception when he shall arrive at the end of the journey. If, on 
the night of our exploration, I had called the roll of the laboring men of these 
cities, I would have received no answer, for the simple reason they were not there 
to answer. I was not more surprised at the people whom I saw there than I was 
surprised at the people whom I missed. O man ! if you have an occupation by 
which you are wearied every night of your life, thank God, for it is the mightiest 
preservative against evil. 

" But by that time the clock of old Trinity Church was striking one, two, 
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve — midnight ! And with 
the police and two elders of my church we sat down at the table in the galleries 
of an evening resort and looked off upon the vortex of death.. The music in full 
blast ; the dance in wildest whirl ; the wine foaming- to the lip of the glass. Mid- 



88 T. DE WITT TALLAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

night on earth is mid-noon in hell. All the demons of the pit were at that moment 
holding high carnival. The blue calcium light suggested the burning brimstone 
of the pit. Seated there, at that hour, in that awful place, you ask me, as I have 
frequently been asked : ' What were the emotions that went through your heart ? ' 
And I shall give the rest of my morning's sermon to telling you how I felt. 

" First of all, an overwhelming sense of pity, deeper than I have felt at death- 
bed or railroad disaster. Why were we there as Christian explorers, while those 
lost souls were there as participators? If they had enjoyed the same healthful and 
Christian surroundings which we have had all our days, and we had been thrown 
amid the contaminations which have destroyed them, the case would have been the 
reverse, and they would have been the spectators and we the actors in that awful 
tragedy of the damned. 

TEARS OF COMPASSION 

" As I sat there I could not keep back the tears — tears of gratitude to God 
for his protecting grace — tears of compassion for those who had fallen so low. 
The difference in moral navigation had been the difference in the way the wind 
blew. The wind of temptation drove them on the rocks. The wind of God's mercy 
drove us out on a fair sea. There are men and women so merciless in their 
criticism of the fallen that you might think that God made them in an especial 
mold, and that they have no capacity for evil ; and yet if they had been subjected 
to the same allurements, instead of stopping at the uptown haunts of iniquity, 
they would at this hour have been wallowing amid horrors or shrieking with 
delirium tremens in the cell of a police station. Instead of boasting over your 
purity, and your integrity, and your sobriety, you had better be thanking God for 
his grace, lest some time the Lord should let you loose and you find out how 
much better you naturally are than others. 

FRAGMENTS OF RUINED HOMES 

" Seated in that gallery of death, and looking off upon the destruction, I be- 
thought myself also : ' These are the fragments of broken homes.' A home is a 
complete thing, and if one member of it wander off, then the home is broken. 
And sitting there, I said : ' Here they are, broken family altars, broken wedding- 
rings, broken vow^s, broken anticipations, broken hearts.' And, as I looked off, the 
dance became wilder and more unrestrained, until it seemed as if the floor broke 
through and the revelers were plunged into a depth from which they might never 
rise, and all these broken families came around the brink and seemed to cry out: 
'Come back, father! Come back, my son! Come back, my daughter! Come 
back, my sister ! ' But no voices returned, and the sound of the feet of the dancers 
grew fainter and fainter, and stopped, and there was thick darkness. And I said : 
'What does all this mean?' And there came up a great hiss of whispering 
voices, saying : ' This is the second death ! ' 



THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 
TRANSPLANTED VICE 



8 9 



" But seated there that night, looking off upon that scene of death, I bethought 
myself also : ' This is only a miserable copy of European dissipations.' In London 
they have what they call the Argyle, the Aquarium, the Strand, the beer-gardens, 
and a thousand places of infamy, and it seems to be the ambition of bad people in 
this country to copy those foreign dissipations. Toadyism when it bows to 
foreign pretense and to foreign equipage and to foreign title is despicable; but 




A HAPPY HOME 

toadyism is more despicable when it bows to foreign vice. Why, you might as well 
steal a pillow-case from a smallpox hospital or the shovels from a scavenger's 
cart or the coffin of a leper, as to make theft of these foreign plagues. If you 
want to destroy the people, have some originality of destruction ; have an American 
trap to catch the bodies and souls of men, instead of infringing on the patented 
inventions of European iniquity. 

IF THE GOOD PEOPLE ONLY KNEW 

" I also felt that if the good people of our cities knew what was going on 
in these haunts of iniquity, they would endure it no longer. The foundations of 
city life are rotten with iniquity, and if the foundations give way the whole 
structure must crumble. If iniquity progresses in the next one hundred years 
in the same ratio that it has progressed in the century now closing, there will not 



9 o T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

be a vestige of moral or religious influence left. It is only a question of sub- 
traction and addition. If the people knew how the virus is spreading they would 
stop it. I think the time has come for action. Revolution is what we want ; 
and that revolution would begin to-morrow if the moral and Christian people 
of our cities knew of the fires that slumber beneath them. 

A NIGHT OF SORROW 

" At the close of our journey that night, we got in the carriage, and we 
came out on Broadway, and as we came down the street everything seemed silent 
save the clattering hoofs and the wheels of our own conveyance. Looking down 
the long line of gas lights, the pavement seemed very solitary. The great sea of 
metropolitan life has ebbed, leaving a dry beach ! New York asleep! No, no! 
Burglary wide awake ! Libertinism wide awake ! Murder wide awake ! Ten 
thousand city iniquities wide awake. The click of the decanters in the worst 
hours of the debauch. The harvest of death full. Eternal woe the reaper. 

" What is that ? Trinity clock striking, one — two. ' Good night,' said the 
officers of the law, and I responded, ' Good night,' for they had been very kind 
and very generous and very helpful to us. Good night ! And yet, was there 
ever an adjective more misapplied? Good night. Why, there was no expletive 
enough scarred and blasted to describe that night. Black night. Forsaken night. 
Night of man's wickedness and woman's overthrow. Night of awful neglect on 
the part of those who might help but do not. For many of those whom we had 
been watching, everlasting night. No hope. No rescue. No God. Black night 
of darkness forever. 

NEW REVELATIONS 

" I unroll the scroll of new revelations. With city missionary, and the police 
of New York and Brooklyn, I have seen some things that I have not yet stated 
in this series of discourses on the night-side of city life. The night of which I 
speak now is darker than any other. No glittering chandelier, no blazing mirror 
adorns it. It is the long, deep exhaustive night of city pauperism. ' We will 
not want a carriage to-night/ said the detectives. ' A carriage would hinder us 
in our work ; a carriage going through the streets where we are going would only 
bring out the people to see what was the matter.' So, on foot we went up the 
dark lanes of poverty. Everything revolting to eye and ear and nostril. Popula- 
tion unwashed, uncombed. Rooms unventilated. Three midnights overlapping 
each other — midnight of the natural world, midnight of crime, midnight of pau- 
perism. Stairs oozing with filth. The inmates have traveled nine-tenths of the 
journey to their final doom. They started in some unhappy home of the city or of 
the country. They plunged into the shambles of death within ten minutes' walk of 
the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and then came on gradually down until they 
have arrived at the Fourth Ward. When they move out of the Fourth Ward they 
will move into Bellevue Hospital; when they move out of Bellevue Hospital they 



THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 91 

will move to Blackwell's Island ; when they move from Blackwell's Island they will 
move to the Potter's Field; when they move from the Potter's Field they will 
move into the darkness beyond the grave ! Bellevue Hospital and Blackwell's 
Island take care of eighteen thousand patients in one year. 

IN THE CHOKING SLUMS 

" As we passed on, the rain pattering on the street and dripping around the 
doorways made the night more dismal. I said : ' Now let the police go ahead,' and 
they flashed their light, and there were fourteen persons trying to sleep, or sleep- 
ing, in one room. Some on a bundle of straw ; more with nothing under them 
and nothing over them. ' Oh,' you say, ' this is exceptional! ' It is not. Thou- 
sands lodge in that way. One hundred and seventy thousand families living 
in tenement houses, in more or less inconvenience, more or less squalor. Half a 
million people in New York City — five hundred thousand people living in tene : 
ment houses — multitudes of these people dying by inches. Of the twenty-four 
thousand that die yearly in New York, fourteen thousand die in tenement-houses. 
No lungs that God ever made could for a long while stand the atmosphere Ave 
breathed for a little while. In the Fourth Ward seventeen thousand people within 
the space of thirty acres. You say, 'Why not clear them out?' There will be 
no reformation for these cities until the tenement-house system is entirely broken 
up. The city authorities will have to buy farms, and will have to put these 
people on those farms, and compel them to work. By the strong arm of the law, 
by the police lantern conjoined with Christian charity, these places must be 
exposed and must be uprooted. Those places in London which have become 
historical for crowded populations — St. Giles, Whitechapel, Holborn, the Strand 
— have their match at last in the Sixth Ward, Eleventh Ward, Fourteenth Ward. 
Seventeenth Ward of New York. No purification for our cities until each 
family shall have something of the privacy and seclusion of a home circle. As 
long as they herd like beasts, they will be beasts. 

AN EVERY DAY TRAGEDY 

" Hark ! What is that heavy thud on the wet pavement ? Why, that is a 
drunkard who has fallen, his head striking against the street — striking very hard. 
The police try to lift him up. Ring the call for the city ambulance. No. Only an 
outcast, only a tatterdemalion — a heap of sores and rags. But look again. Per- 
haps he has some marks of manhood on his face ; perhaps he may have been made 
in the image of God ; perhaps he has a soul which will live after the dripping 
heavens of this dismal night have been rolled together as a scroll ; perhaps he 
may have been died for, by a King ; perhaps he may yet be a conqueror charioted 
in the splendors of heavenly welcome. But we must pass on. We cross the 
street, and there, the rain beating in his face, lies a man entirely unconscious. I 



92 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



wonder where he came from. I wonder if anyone is waiting for him. I wonder 
if he was ever rocked in a Christian cradle. I wonder if that gashed and bloated 
forehead was ever kissed by a fond mother's lips. I wonder if he is stranded 
for eternity. But we cannot stop. 

"IS THAT TALMAGE?" 

" Riding up Broadway, I asked the driver to stop at a street lamp that I 
might better examine my memorandum (it happened to be in front of a place of 
amusement), when a man rushed out with great alarm and excitement, and said 
to the driver : ' Is that Talmage you have inside there ? ' Men write me with 




A WRETCHED HOM£ 



commercial handwriting, protesting, evidently because they fear that sometime in 
their midnight carousal they may meet a Christian reformer and explorer. I had 
thought to preach three or four sermons on the night-side of city life; but now 
that I find that all the powers of darkness are so agitated and alarmed and 
terrorized, I plant the battery for new assault upon the castles of sin, and shall 
go on saying all I have to say. 

" Looking out of the carriage I saw a tragedy on the corner of Broadway 
and Houston Street. A young man, evidently doubting as to which direction 
he had better take, his hat lifted high enough so you could see he had an intelligent 



THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 93 

forehead; he had a stout chest and a robust development. Splendid young man. 
Cultured young man. Honored young man. Why did he stop there while so 
many were going up and down? The fact is, that every man has a good angel 
and a bad angel contending for the mastery of his spirit, and there was a good 
angel and a bad angel struggling with that young man's soul at the corner 
of Broadway and Houston Street. ' Come with me,' said the good angel ; ' I will 
take you home ; I will spread my wing over your pillow ; I will lovingly escort 
you all through life under supernatural protection; I will bless every cup you 
drink out of, every couch you rest on, every doorway you enter ; I will consecrate 
your tears when you weep, your sweat when you toil, and at the last I will hand 
over your grave into the hand of the bright angel of a Christian resurrection. 
In answer to your father's petition and your mother's prayer, I have been sent 
of the Lord out of heaven to be your guardian spirit. Come with me,' said the 
good angel in a voice of unearthly symphony. It was music like that which drops 
from a lute of heaven when a seraph breathes on it. 

THE LURE OF THE TEMPTER. 

" ' No, no,' said the bad angel, ' come with me ; I have something better to 
offer ; the wines I pour are from chalices of bewitching carousal ; the dance I 
lead is over floor tessellated with unrestrained indulgencies ; there is no God to 
frown on the temples of sin where I worship. The skies are Italian. The paths 
I tread are through meadows, daisied and primrosed. Come with me ! ' 

" The young man hesitated at a time when hesitation was ruin, and the bad 
angel smote the good angel until it departed, spreading wings through the starlight 
upward and away, until a door flashed open in the sky and forever the wings 
vanished. That was the turning point in that young man's history ; for, the good 
angel flown, he hesitated no longer, but started on a pathway which is beautiful 
at the opening, but blasted at the last. The bad angel, leading the way, opened 
gate after gate, and at each gate the road became rougher and the sky more 
lurid, and what was peculiar, as the gate slammed shut it came to with a jar that 
indicated that it would never open. Passed each portal, there was a grinding of 
locks and a shoving of bolts ; and the scenery on each side the road changed from 
gardens to deserts, and the June air became a cutting December blast, and the 
bright wings of the bad angel turned to sackcloth, and the eyes of light became 
hollow with hopeless grief, and the fountains, that at the start had tossed with 
wine, poured forth bubbling tears and foaming blood, and on the right side 
of the road there was a serpent, and the man said to the bad angel, ' What is 
that serpent? ' and the answer was, ' That is the serpent of stinging remorse.* 

THE ILLUSION DISPELLED 

" On the left side of the road there was a lion, and the man asked the bad 
angel, ' What is that lion ? ' and the answer was, ' That is the lion of all-devouring 



94 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



despair.' A vulture flew through the sky, and the man asked the bad 'angel, 
' What is that vulture ? ' and the answer was, ' That is the vulture waiting for 
the carcasses of the slain.' And then the man began to try to pull off him the 
folds of something that had wound him around and around, and he said to the 
bad angel, ' What is it that twists me in this awful convolution ? ' and the answer 
was, ' That is the worm that never dies ! ' And then the man said to the bad angel, 
' What does all this mean ? I trusted in what you said at the street corner ; I 
trusted it all, and why have you thus deceived me?' Then the last deception 
fell off the charmer, and it said, ' I was sent forth from the pit to destroy your 
soul ; I watched my chance for many a long year ; when you hesitated that night 
I gained my triumph ; now you are here. Ha ! ha ! You are here. Come, now, 




A GAMBLING ESTABLISHMENT 

let us fill these two chalices of fire, and drink together to darkness and woe and 
death. Hail ! Hail ! ' O young man ! will the good angel sent forth by Christ, 
or the bad angel sent forth by sin, get the victory over your soul? Their wings 
are interlocked this moment above you, contending for your destiny, as above the 
Apennines, eagle and condor fight mid-sky. This hour may decide your destiny. 
God help you. To hesitate is to die ! 



A DEN OF THIEVES 

" There was nothing that more impressed me on that terrible night of explo- 
ration than the respect which crime pays to law when it is really confronted. 
Why do those eight or ten desperadoes immediately stop their blasphemy and their 



THE EXPLORATION CONTINUED 95 

uproar and their wrangling? It is because an officer of the law calmly throws back 
the lapel of his coat and shows the badge of authority. The fact is that govern- 
ment is ordained of heaven, and just so far as the police officer does his duty, 
just so far is he a deputy of the Lord Almighty. That is the reason one in- 
spector of New York sometimes goes in and arrests four or five desperadoes. He 
may be a man of comparatively slight stature, yet when one is backed up by 
omnipotent justice he can do anything. I said, ' What is this glazed window, and 
who are these mysterious people going in and then coming out and passing down 
the street, looking to the pavement, and keeping a regular step until they hear 
a quick step behind them, and then darting down an alley ? ' This place, in the 
night of our exploration, was what the Bible calls ' a den of thieves.' They will 
not admit it. You cannot prove it against them, for the reason that the keeper 
and the patrons are the acutest men in the city. No sign of stolen goods, no 
loud talk about misdemeanors, but here a table surrounded by three or four per- 
sons whispering ; yonder a table surrounded by three or four more persons whis- 
pering ; before each man a mug of beer or stronger intoxicant. He will not drink 
to unconsciousness ; he will only drink to get his courage up to the point of reck- 
lessness, all the while managing to keep his eye clear and his hand steady. 

PLANNING VILLAINY 

" These men around this table are talking over last night's exploit ; their 
narrow escape from the basement door; how nearly they fell from the window- 
ledge of the second story ; how the bullet grazed the hair. What is this bandaged 
hand you see in that room ? That was cut by the window-glass as the burglar 
thrust his hand through to the inside fastening. How did that man lose his eye ? 
It was destroyed three years ago by a premature flash of gunpowder in a store 
lock. Who are these three or four surrounding this other table ? They are plan- 
ning for to-night's villainy. They know just what hour the last member of the 
family will retire. They are in collusion with the servant, who has promised 
to leave one of the back windows open. They know at what time the man of 
wealth will leave his place of dissipation and start for home, and they are 
arranging it how they shall come out of the dark alley and bring him down with a 
slungshot. 

A UNIVERSITY OF CRIME 

" No sign of desperation in this room of thieves, and yet how many false 
keys, how many ugly pocket-knives, how many brass knuckles, how many revol- 
vers ! A few vulgar pictures on the wall, and the inevitable bar. Rum they must 
have to rest them after the exciting marauding. Rum they must have before 
they start on the new expedition of arson and larceny and murder. But not 
ordinary rum. It is poisoned four times. Poisoned first by the manufacturer; 
poisoned secondly by the wholesale dealer ; poisoned thirdly by the retail dealer: 
poisoned fourthly by the saloon-keeper. Poisoned four times, it is just right to fit 



96 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

one for cruelty and desperation. These men have calculated to the last quarter of 
a glass how much they need to take to qualify them for their work. They must 
not take a drop too much nor a drop too little. These are the professional crimi- 
nals of the city, between twenty-three and twenty-four hundred of them, in this 
cluster of cities. They are as thoroughly drilled in crime as, for good purposes, 
medical colleges train doctors, law colleges train lawyers, theological seminaries 
train clergymen. These criminals have been apprentices and journeymen; but 
now they are boss workmen. They have gone through the freshman, sophomore, 
junior and senior classes of the great university of crime, and have graduated 
with diplomas signed by all the faculty of darkness. 

" They have no ambition for an easy theft, or an unskilled murder, or a 
blundering blackmail. They must have something difficult. They must have 
in their enterprise the excitement of peril. They must have something that will 
give them an opportunity of bravado. They must do something which amateurs 
in crime dare not do. These are the bank robbers, about sixty of them in this 
cluster of cities — men who somehow get in the bank during the daytime, then at 
night spring out upon the watchman, fasten him, and have plenty of time for 
opening the strongest safe. These are the men who come in to examine the 
directory in the back part of your store while their accomplices are in the front 
part of the store engaging you in conversation, then dropping the directory and 
investigating the money drawers. 

BLACKMAILERS 

" Among these professional criminals in our cities are the blackmailers — 
those who would have you pay a certain amount of money or have your char- 
acter tarnished. If you are guilty I have no counsel to give in this matter ; but 
if you are innocent let me say that no one of integrity need ever fear the black- 
mailer. All you have to do is to put the case immediately in the hands of the 
chief of police, and you will be delivered from the menace. Depend upon it, 
however, that every dollar you pay to a blackmailer is toward your own ever- 
lasting enthralment. A man in a cavern fighting a tigress might as well con- 
sent to give the tigress his right hand, letting her eat it up, with the supposition 
that she would let him off with the rest of his body, as for you to pay anything 
to a blackmailer with the idea of getting your character left unassailed. The 
thing to be done is to have the tigress shot, and that the law is willing to do. 
Let me lay down a principle you can put in your memorandum books, and put 
in the front part of your Bible, and in the back part of your Bible, and put in 
your day-book, and put in your ledger — this principle: that no man's character 
is ever sacrificed until he sacrifices it himself. But you surrender your reputa- 
tion, your fortune, your home, and your immortal soul, when you pay a farthing 
to a blackmailer. 

" But in all these dens of thieves we find those who excite only our pity — 
people flung off the steeps of decent society. Having done wrong once, in despair 



EXPLORATION CONTINUED 



97 



they went to the bottom. In disgrace they go down. Oh! how many, by force 
of circumstances, and at the start with no very bad intention, get off the track 
and perish. A gentleman one morning told me of an incident which occurred in 
a large commercial establishment, I believe the fourth in size in the whole 
country. The employer said to a young lady in the establishment, ' You must 
dress better.' She said, ' I cannot dress better ; I get six dollars a week, and I 
pay four dollars for my board, and I have two dollars for dress and for my 
car fare ; I cannot dress better.' Then he said, ' You must get it in some other 
way.' Well, I suppose she could steal, but that was not what was meant. I 
do not know how that incident affects you; but when it was told to me it 
made every drop of my blood, from scalp to heel, tingle with indignation. 
The fact is that there are thousands of men and women dropping into immorality 
and crime by force of circumstances, and by their destitution. Under the same 




THE: CITY VAN OR BLACK MARIA 



kind of pressure you and I would have perished. It is despicable to stand on 
shore laughing at the shipwrecked struggling in the breakers when we ought 
to be getting out the rockets and the lifeboat and the ropes from the wreck- 
ing establishment. How much have you ever done to get this class ashore? 



CITIES TO BE REDEEMED . 

" I speak a word of good cheer to all the wandering and the lost, and I 
believe these cities are going to be redeemed. You know there is going to be 
another deluge. ' Why,' you say, ' I thought the rainbow at the end of the great 
delug'e, and the rainbow after every shower, was a sign that there should never 
be a deluge again ! ' But there will be another deluge. It will rain more than 
forty days and forty nights. The ark that will float that deluge will be immeas- 
7 



98 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

urably larger than Noah's ark, for it will hold a quadrillion of passengers. It 
will be the deluge of mercy, and the ark that floats that deluge will have five 
doors — one at the north to let in the frozen populations; one at the south to let 
in the sweltering and the sunburned ; one at the east to let all China come in ; 
one at the west, to let America in; one at the top, to let Christ, with all his 
flashing train of cherubim and archangel, enter. And, as the rainbow of the 
ancient deluge gave sign that there would never be a deluge of destruction 
again, so the rainbow of this last deluge will give sign that the deluge will 
never depart. ' For the knowledge of God shall cover the earth, as the waters 
cover the sea.' Oh ! ship of salvation, sail on. With all thy countless freight 
of mortals, steer for the eternal shore. The thunders of the last day shall be 
the cannonade that will greet you into the harbor. Church triumphant, stretch 
down your arms of light across the gangway to welcome into port Church mili- 
tant. ' Hallelujah ! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.' ' 

THE CRUSADE WIDELY APPROVED 

There was a freshness, a vigor, a vital force in these eloquent sermons 
against the vices of society that compelled the universal tribute of admiration 
from all right-thinking people. It was felt that a great preacher was speaking 
to the nation and to the world. 

Writing of his sermonic attacks on extravagance, gambling, licentiousness, 
sinful pleasures, horse racing, Sabbath-breaking, and drunkenness, a leading 
metropolitan critic said : 

" There is a might and force in Dr. Talmage's strong, nervous sentences, 
as they fall, hot and crushing, from his lips ; he talks right on, as one of the old 
prophets of Israel might be supposed to talk as he came forth from his solitude 
with the burden of the Lord upon his soul, and with the vision before his eye 
of multitudes crowding thickly the broad road to destruction. And there is a 
special need, at this hour, of the lifting up of a standard against these spreading 
evils. It is a time of a looseness in the old convictions upon the subject, and of 
no little departure from the former Christian practice. There is a line some- 
where, dividing between lawful and unlawful amusements , and it behooves 
Christians to find it. It is time to pause, and for those who have passed beyond 
the limit to retrace their steps and repent in dust and ashes for the evil they have 
done, if one-half of what Mr. Talmage says is true. And young Christians in 
particular, who are .soon to be the leaders in God's great work of saving the 
world, will better fit themselves for their glorious service in the prayer and 
class-room than in the theatre or opera house." 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 

HE WAS WISE AS WELL AS ELOQUENT — HIS VIEWS ON PERSONAL INFLUENCE, DRESS, 
DEBT, AN AIM IN LIFE, BORROWING TROUBLE, BUSINESS METHODS, PARENTAL 
DUTIES AND KINDRED TOPICS 




N the realm of social philosophy, the platform and 
pulpit utterances of Dr. Talmage, no less than his lit- 
erary work, must be accorded a place by no means 
inconspicuous. He was a maximist as well as moral- 
ist and many of his expressions have become familiar 
throughout the land. It was a peculiarity of his 
unique genius that he touched no subject that he did 
not illuminate. If he walked across a pasture field, 
the daisies and buttercups and grasses instantly be- 
came alive and nodded to him in a language which 
he could readily interpret ; in the woods, the trees told 
him their secrets, and the birds chirruped, and the 
brooks whispered in a way he could understand. So, 
in the social affairs of every-day life, he seemed to see 

more deeply and to perceive more accurately than others the influences that 

make for human misery or happiness. 



.,....., -, n 



A CHAIN OF INFLUENCE 

"All people between thirty and forty years of age (he wrote) ; yes, between 
forty and fifty; aye, between fifty and sixty, and all septuagenarians, need a 
surrounding conjunction of good influences. In Sing Sing, Auburn, Moyamen- 
sing, and all the other great prisons, are men and women who went wrong in 
mid-life and old age. We need around us a cordon of good influences. We 
forget to apply the well-known rule that a chain is no stronger than its weakest 
link. If the chain be made of a thousand links, and nine hundred and ninety- 
nine are strong, but one is weak, the chain will be in danger of breaking at 
that one weak link. We may be strong in a thousand excellencies, and yet 
have one weakness that endangers us. This is the reason that we see men 
around us, distinguished for a whole round of virtues, collapse and go down. 

LofC. - " 



100 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



The weak link, in the otherwise stout chain, gave away under the pressure. 
" The bridge of character may be built up of mighty links strong enough 
to hold a mountain; but if there be one weak spot, that one point, overlooked, 
may afterward cause the destruction of the whole being. And what multi- 
tudes have gone down for all time and eternity, because in the chain-bridge 
of their character there was lacking a strong middle bolt ! He had but one 
fault, and that was avarice, hence forgery. He had but one fault, and that was 
a burning desire for intoxicants, and hence his fatal debauch. She had but 
one fault, and that was an inordinate fondness for dress, and hence her own 



» 1 ^ ■"■ 




3 ^K 




•**& *..»lSS»k 9^B "•'* 





DR. TAI.MAGK AT HIS DESK IN "THE CHRISTIAN HERALD OFFICE 



and her husband's bankruptcy. She had but one fault, and that was her quick 
temper, and hence the disgraceful outburst. What we all want is to have put 
around us a strong chain of good influences. Christian association is a link. 
Church membership is a link. Scripture research is a link. Faith in God is a 
link. Put together all these influences. ' Make a chain,' 

" For many of the circumstances of life w 7 e are not responsible. For our 
parentage we are not responsible ; for the place of our nativity, not responsible : 
for our features, our stature, our color, not responsible; for the family relations 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 101 

in which we were born, for our natural tastes, for our mental characters, not 
responsible. But we are responsible for the associations that we choose, and 
the moral influences under which we put ourselves. Character seeks an equilib- 
rium. A. B. is a good man. Y. Z. is a bad man. Let them now voluntarily 
seek each other's society. A. B. will lose part of his goodness, and Y. Z. part 
of his badness, and they will gradually approach each other in character, and 
in the end stand on the same level. 

" One of the old painters refused to look at poor pictures, because he said 
that it damaged his style. A musician cannot afford to dwell among discords ; 
nor can a writer afford to peruse books of an inferior style; nor an architect 
to walk out among disproportioned structures. And no man or woman was 
ever so good as to be able to afford evil associations from choice. There- 
fore, make it a rule of your life to go among those better than yourselves. You 
cannot find them? What a pink of perfection you must be! When was your 
lofty character completed? What a misfortune for the saintly and the angelic 
of Heaven that they are not enjoying the improving influences of your society! 
Ah, if you cannot find those better than yourself, it is because you are igno- 
rant of yourself. 

EVIL INFLUENCES 

" Here is a young man of good physical health, good manners, and good 
education. How shall he put together enough links to make a chain for the 
down-hill road? I will give him some directions. First, let him smoke. If 
he cannot stand cigarettes, let him try cigars. I think that cigarettes will help 
him on this road a little more rapidly, because the doctors say that there is 
more poison in them than in cigars. And I have a little more confidence in 
this because about fifty of the first young men of one city alone, during one 
year, were, according to the doctors' reports, killed by cigarettes. Let him 
drink light wines first, or ale, or lager, and gradually he will be able to take 
something stronger ; and as all styles of strong drink are more and more adul- 
terated, his progress will be facilitated. With the old-time drinks, a man seldom 
got delirium tremens before thirty or forty years of age ; now he can get the 
madness by the time that he is eighteen. Let him play cards, and always put 
up money to add interest to the game. If father and mother will play with him, 
that will help by way of countenancing the habit. And it will be such a pleas- 
ant thing to think over in the Day of Judgment, when the parents give an 
account for the elevating manner in which they have reared their children ! 

FORGING A CHAIN OF SLAVERY 

" Every Sunday afternoon take a carriage ride, and stop at the hotels or 
at the side of the road for refreshments. Do not let the old fogy prejudice 
against Sabbath-breaking dominate you. Have a membership in some club, 



io2 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

where libertines go and tell about some of their victorious sins, and laugh as 
loud as any of them in derision at those who belong to the same sex as your 
mother and sister. Pitch your Bible overboard as old-fashioned, fit only for 
women and children. Read all the magazine articles that put Christianity at 
a disadvantage. And go to hear all the lecturers who malign Christ, and say 
that instead of being the mighty One he pretended to be, he was an impostor 
and the implanter of a great delusion. Go, at first out of curiosity, to see all 
the houses of dissipation, and then go because you have felt the thrill of their 
fascination. Getting along splendidly, now ! Become more defiant of all decency, 
more loud-mouthed in your atheism, more thoroughly alcoholized ; and instead 
of the small stakes, that will do well enough for games of chance in a lady's 
parlor, put up something worthy. Put up more — put up all you have. Well 
done! You have succeeded. You have made a chain." 

BUSINESS A SCHOOL 

Men in any line of business, employers as well as employed, might read 
with profit these views of Dr. Talmage on the moral and educational features 
of commercial life: 

" Business life is a school of patience. In your e very-day life how many 
things there are to annoy and to disquiet ! Bargains will rub. Commercial 
men will sometimes fail to meet their engagements. Cash-book and money- 
drawer will sometimes quarrel. Goods ordered will come too late, or be dam- 
aged in the transportation. Business is a school of useful knowledge. Mer- 
chants do not read many books, and do not study lexicons. They do not dive 
into the profounds of learning, and yet nearly all through their occupations they 
come to understand questions of finance, and politics, and geography, and juris- 
prudence, and ethics. Business is a severe schoolmistress. If pupils will not 
learn, she strikes them over the head and heart with severe losses. You put 
$5,000 into an enterprise. It is all gone. You say, ' That is a dead loss.' Oh, 
no. You are paying the schooling. That was only tuition, very large tuition — 
I told you it was a severe schoolmistress — but it was worth it. You learned 
things under that process you would not have learned in any other way. 

" Traders in grain come to know something about foreign harvests ; traders 
in fruit come to know something about the prospects of tropical productions ; 
manufacturers of American goods come to understand the ' tariff on imported 
articles ; publishers of books must come to understand the new law of copy- 
right ; owners of ships must come to know winds and shoals and navigation ; 
and every bale of cotton, and every raisin-cask, and every tea-box, and every 
cluster of bananas is so much literature for a business man. 

" There are business men who have fought the moral battle and gained 
the victory. People come out of such a man's store, and they say, ' Well, if 
there ever was a Christian trader, that is one.' Integrity kept the books and 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 103 

waited on the customers. Light from the eternal world flashed through the 
show-windows. Love to God and love to man presided in that storehouse- 
Some day people going through the street notice that the shutters of the win- 
dow are not down. The bar of the store-door has not been removed. People 
say, ' What is the matter ? ■ You go up a little closer, and you see written 
on the card of that window, ' Closed on account of the death of one of the firm.' 
That day all through the circles of business there is talk about how good a 
man has gone. Boards of trade pass resolutions of sympathy, and churches 
of Christ pray, ' Help, Lord, for the godly man ceaseth.' He has macle fiis 
last bargain, he has suffered his last loss, he has ached with the last fatigue. 
His children will get the result of his industry, or, if through misfortune there 
be no dollars left, they will have an estate of prayer and Christian example, 
which will be everlasting. Heavenly rewards for earthly discipline. 

THE FOLLY OF AVARICE \ 

" You hear that it is avarice which drives men of business through the 
street, and that is the commonly accepted idea. I do not believe a word of it. 
The vast multitude of these business men are toiling on for others. To educate 
their children, to put the wing of protection over their households, to have 
something left so that when they pass out of this life their wives and children 
will not have to go to the poorhouse, that is the way I translate this energy in 
the street and store — the vast majority of this energy. Grip, Gouge & Co. do 
not do all the business. Some of us remember that when the Central America 
was coming home from California it was wrecked. President Arthur's father- 
in-law was the heroic captain of that ship, and went down with most of the 
passengers. Some of them got off into the life-boats. There was a young 
man returning from California who had a bag of gold in his hand; and as the 
last boat shoved off from the ship that was to go down, that young man shouted 
to a comrade in the boat : ' Here, John, catch this gold ; there are three thou- 
sand dollars ; take it home to my old mother ; it will make her comfortable in her 
last days.' Grip, Gouge & Co. do not do all the business of the world. 

THE GNAT AND THE CAMEL 

" A man after long observation has formed the suspicion that in a cup of 
water he is about to drink there is a grub or the grandparent of a gnat. He 
goes and gets a sieve or strainer. He takes the water and pours it through 
the sieve in the broad light. He says, ' I would rather do anything almost than 
drink this water until this larva be extirpated.' This water is brought under 
inquisition. The experiment is successful. The water rushes through the sieve 
and leaves against the side of the sieve the grub or gnat. Then the man care- 
fully removes the insect and drinks the water in placidity. But going out one 
day, and hungry, he devours a 'ship of the desert/ the camel, which the Jews 



104 T- DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

were forbidden to eat. The gastronomer has no compunctions of conscience. 
He suffers from no indigestion. He puts his lower jaw under the camel's 
forefoot, and his upper jaw over the hump of the camel's back, and gives one 
swallow, and the dromedary disappears forever. He strained out a gnat — he 
swallowed a camel ! 

" Many are abhorrent of small sins, while they are reckless in regard to 
magnificent thefts. You will find many a merchant who, while he is so care- 
ful that he would not take a yard of cloth or a spool of cotton from the counter 
without paying for it, and who, if a bank cashier should make a mistake and 
send in a roll of bills five dollars too much, would dispatch a messenger in hot 
haste to return the surplus, yet who will go into a stock company, in which 
after a while he gets control of the stock, and then waters the stock and makes 
one hundred thousand dollars appear like two hundred thousand dollars. He 
only stole one hundred thousand dollars by the operation. Many of the men 
of fortune made their wealth in that way." 

THE IMMORALITY OF DEBT 

Debt, from Dr. Talmage's standpoint, was not only unphilosophical, but it 
was in most cases immoral, because generally avoidable. He said: 

" There is one word that has dragged down more people into bankruptcy, 
and state-prison, and perdition, than any other word in the commercial world, 
and that is the word ' borrow.' This word is responsible for nearly alf the 
defalcations, and embezzlements, and financial consternations of every land and 
age. When an executor takes money out of a large estate to speculate with it, 
he does not purloin it, he only ' borrows.' When a banker makes an overdraft 
that he may go into speculation, he does not commit a theft; he only 'borrows.' 
When the head of a large financial institution, through flaming advertisements 
in some religious paper, or gilt-edged certificate, gets country people to put 
their money into some enterprise for carrying on an undeveloped nothing, it 
is not fraud ; he only ' borrows/ When a young man having easy access to a 
money drawer, or a confidential clerk having easy access to the books, takes a 
certain amount of money, and with it makes a Wall Street excursion, he is 
going to put it back, he is going to put it all back, he is going to put it back 
pretty soon ; he only ' borrows.' Why, when you are going to do wrong, need 
you pronounce so long a word as the word ' borrow ' — a word of six letters — 
when you can get a shorter word, a word more accurate, a word more descrip- 
tive of the reality, a word of five letters — the word ' steal ? ' 

EXTRAVAGANCE TO BLAME 

" There have been no more absorbing questions in America than these : 
What caused ' Black Wednesday? ' What caused ' Black Friday? ' What has 
caused all the black days of financial disaster with which Wall Street has been 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 105 

connected for the last forty years? Some say it is the credit-system. Some- 
thing back of that. Some say it is the spirit of gambling ever and anon becom- 
ing epidemic. Something back of that. Some say it is the sudden shrinkage 
in the value of securities, which even the most honest and intelligent men could 
not have foreseen. Something back of that. I will give you the primal cause 
of all the disturbances. It is the extravagance of modern society, which impels 
a man to spend more money than he can honestly make. He goes into Wall 
Street in order to get the means for inordinate display. Sometimes the man is 
to blame, and sometimes his wife, and oftener both. An income of five thou- 
sand dollars, of ten thousand dollars, of twenty thousand dollars, is not 
enough for a man to keep up the style of living he proposes, and therefore he 
steers his bark toward the maelstrom. Other men have suddenly snatched up 
fifty or a hundred thousand dollars — why not he? The present income of the 
man not being large enough, he must move earth and hell to catch up with his 
neighbors. Others have a country seat — so must he. Others have an extrav- 
agant caterer — so must he. Others have a palatial residence — so must he. 
Extravagance is the cause of nearly all the defalcations of the last fifty years ; 
and if you will go through the history of all the great panics and great financial 
disturbances, no sooner have you found the story of trouble than right back of 
it you find the story of how many horses the man had, how many carriages 
the man had, how many residences in the country the man had, how many 
banquets the man gave; always, and not one exception, either directly or 
indirectly, extravagance was the cause. 

NATIONAL EXTRAVAGANCE 

" Extravagance accounts for the disturbance of national finances. Aggre- 
gations are made up of units, and when one-half of the people of this country 
owe the other half, how can we expect financial prosperity? Every four years 
we get a great spasm of virtue, and when a President is to be elected we say, 
' Now, down with the old administration, and let us have another Secretary of 
the Treasury, and let us have a new deal of things, and then we will get over 
all our perturbation.' I do not care who is President or who is Secretary of 
the Treasury, or how much bread stuffs go out of the country, or how much 
gold is imported, for until we learn to pay our debts, and it becomes a general 
theory in this country that men must buy no more than they can pay for, there 
will be no permanent prosperity. Extravagance also accounts for much of the 
pauperism which afflicts communities. Who are these people whom you have 
to help? Many of them are the children of parents who had plenty, lived in 
luxury, had more than they needed, spent all they had — spent more, too — then 
died, and left their families in poverty. Some of those who call on you now 
for aid had an ancestry that supped on Burgundy and woodcock. I could name 
a score of men who have every luxury. They smoke the best cigars, and they 



106 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

drink the finest wines, and they have the grandest surroundings, and when 
they die their families will go on the cold charity of the world. Xow, the death 
of such a man is a grand larceny. He swindles the world as he goes into his 
coffin, and he deserves to have his bones sold to the medical museum for anatom- 
ical specimens, the proceeds to furnish bread for his children. 

" I know it cuts close. Some of you make a great swash in life, and after 
a while you will die, and ministers will be sent for to come and stand by your 
coffin and lie about your excellencies; but they will not come. If you send for 
me, this will be my text : ' He that provideth not for his own, and especially 
for those of his own household, is worse than an infidel.' ' : 

EDUCATIONAL "CRAMMING" 

He believed that child education is sadly in need of reformation. 

" Some children," he said, " go to school with a strap of books half as high 
as themselves ! In some of the cities, parents do not allow their children to grad- 
uate, for the simple reason, the}- say, ' We cannot afford to allow our children's 
health to be destroyed in order that they may gather the honors of an institution.' 
Tens of thousands of children educated into imbecility ! Connected with many 
such literary establishments there ought to be asylums for the wrecked. It 
is push, and crowd, and cram, and stuff, and jam, until the child's intellect is 
bewildered, and the memory is ruined, and the health is gone. There are chil- 
dren turned out from the schools who once were full of romping and laughter, 
and had cheeks crimson with health, who are now pale-faced, irritated, asthmatic, 
old before their time. One of the saddest sights on earth is an old-mannish boy, 
or an old-womanish girl. 

" Think of it ! Girls ten years of age studying algebra ! Boys twelve 
years of age racking their brains over trigonometry! Children unacquainted 
with their mother-tongue crying over their Latin, French, and German lessons! 
All the vivacity of their nature beaten out of them by the heavy beetle of a Greek 
lexicon ! And you doctor them for this, and you give them a little medicine for 
that, and you wonder what is the matter with them. I will tell you what is the 
matter with them. They are finishing their education ! 

EDUCATED TO IMBECILITY 

" In my parish in Philadelphia a little child was so pushed at school that 
she was thrown into a fever, and in her dying delirium, all night long, she was 
trying to recite the multiplication-table. In my boyhood I remember that in 
our class at school there was one lad who knew more than all of us put together. 
If we were fast in our arithmetic, he extricated us. When we stood up for the 
spelling-class, he was almost alwavs at the head of the class. Visitors came 
to his father's house, and he was always brought in as a prodigy. At eighteen 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 



107 



years of age he was an idiot ! He lived ten years an idiot, and died an idiot. 
The parents and the teachers made him an idiot. 

" You may natter your pride by forcing- your child to know more than 
any other children, but you are making a sacrifice of that child, if by the addi- 
tions to its intelligence you are making a subtraction from its future. The 
child will go away from such maltreatment with no exuberance to fight the battle 




WAU, STREET, THE WORLD'S FINANCIAL CENTRE 



io8 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

of life. Such children may get along very well while you take care of them, 
but when you are old or dead, alas ! for them, if, through the long system of 
education which you adopted, they have no swarthiness or force of character 
to take care of themselves. 

" The Carthaginians used to sacrifice their children by putting them into 
the arms of an idol which thrust forth its hands. The child was put into the 
arms of the idol, and no sooner touched the arms than it dropped into the fire. 
But it was the art of the mothers to keep the children smiling and laughing until 
the moment they died. There may be a fascination and a hilarity about the stvles 
of education of which I am speaking ; but it also is only laughter at the moment 
of sacrifice. 

HOME DISCIPLINE 

" There must be harmony between the father's government and the mother's 
government. The father will be tempted to too great rigor. The mother will 
be tempted to too great leniency. Her tenderness will overcome her. Her voice 
is a little softer, her hand seems better fitted to pull out a thorn and soothe a 
pang. Children wanting anything from the mother, cry for it. They hope to 
dissolve her will with tears. But the mother must not interfere, must not coax 
ofT, must not beg for the child when the hour comes for the assertion of parental 
supremacy and the subjugation of a child's temper. 

" There comes in the history of every child an hour when it is tested whether 
the parents shall rule or the child shall rule. That is the crucial hour. If the 
child triumphs in that hour, then he will some day make you crouch. It is a 
horrible scene; I have witnessed it; a mother come to old age, shivering with 
terror in the presence of a son who cursed her gray hairs, and mocked her wrinkled 
face, and begrudged her the crust she munched with her toothless gums ! 

' How sharper than a serpent's tooth is, 
To have a thankless child.' 

TOO MUCH RIGOR 

" But, on the other hand, too great rigor must be avoided. It is a sad thing 
when domestic government becomes cold military despotism. Trappers on the 
prairie fight fire with fire, but you cannot successfully fight your child's bad 
temper with your bad temper. We must not be too minute in our inspection. 
We cannot expect our children to be perfect. We must not see everything. 
Since we have two or three faults of our own, we ought not to be too rough 
when we discover that our children have as many. You cannot scold or pound 
your children into nobility of character. The bloom of a child's heart can never 
be seen under a cold drizzle. Above all, avoid fretting and scolding in the house- 
hold. Better than ten years of fretting at your children is one good, round, 
old-fashioned application of the slipper! The arithmetics cannot calculate how 
many thousands of children have been ruined forever either through too great 



DR. TALM AGE'S PHILOSOPHY 109 

rigor or too great leniency. The heavens and the earth are filled with the groans 
of the sacrifice. 

" Some one asked a mother, whose children had turned out very well, what 
was the secret by which she prepared them for usefulness and for the Chris- 
tian life, and she said, ' This was the secret : When, in the morning, I washed 
my children, I prayed that they might be washed in the fountain of a Saviour's 
mercy. When I put on their garments, I prayed that they might be arrayed 
in the robe of a Saviour's righteousness. When I gave them- food, I prayed 
that they might be fed with manna from heaven. When I started them on the 
road to school, I prayed that their path might be as the shining light, brighter, 
and brighter to the perfect day. When I put them to sleep, I prayed that they 
might be enfolded in the Saviour's arms.' ' Oh,' said one, ' that was verv old- 
fashioned.' It was quite old-fashioned. But do you suppose that a child under 
such nurture as that ever turned out bad ? 

A PLEA FOR THE CHILDREN 

" I lift up my voice against the sacrifice of children. I look out of my 
window on a Sabbath, and I see a group of children, unwashed, uncombed, 
unchristianized. Who cares for them? Who prays for them? Who utters to 
them one kind word? When the city missionary, passing along the Park in 
New York, saw a ragged lad and heard him swearing, he said to him : ' My 
son, stop swearing! You ought to go to the house of God to-day. You ought 
to be good; you ought to be a Christian.' The lad looked in his face and said: 
' Ah, it is easy for you to talk, well clothed as you are, and well fed ; but we 
chaps hain't got no chance.' Who goes forth to snatch them up from crime 
and death and woe? Who to-day will go forth and bring them into schools and 
churches ? 

" During the early French Revolution, there was at Bourges a company of 
boys who used to train every day as young soldiers. They had on tneir flag 
this inscription : ' Tremble, tyrants, tremble ; we are growing up.' Mightily 
suggestive ! This generation is passing off, and a mightier generation is com- 
ing on. Will they be the foes of tyranny, the foes of sin, and the foes of death, 
or will they be the foes of God? They are coming up ! " 

HIS BEAUTIFUL OPTIMISM 

Taking the bright view of things, no matter how adverse they looked, was 
a characteristic of Dr. Talmage. He did not believe in borrowing trouble. 

"The majority of the troubles of life (he wrote) are imaginary, and the 
most of those anticipated never come. At any rate, there is no cause of com- 
plaint against God. See how much he hath done to make thee happy. I denounce 
the sin of borrowing trouble. Such a habit of mind and heart is wrong, because 
it puts one into despondency that ill fits him for duty. I planted two rose bushes 



no T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

in my garden. The one thrived beautifully, the other perished. I found the 
dead one on the shady side of the house. Our dispositions, like our plants, need 
sunshine. Expectancy of repulse is the cause of many secular and religious 
failures. Fear of bankruptcy has uptorn many a fine business and sent the 
man dodging among the note-shavers. Fear of slander and abuse has often 
invited all the long-beaked vultures of scorn and backbiting. Many of the 
misfortunes of life, like hyneas, flee if you courageously meet them. 

DON'T LOOK FOR MISFORTUNE 

" You will have nothing but misfortune in the future if you sedulously 
watch for it. How shall a man catch the right kind of fish if he arranges his 
line and hook and bait to catch lizards and water serpents? Hunt for bats and 
hawks, and bats and hawks you will find. Hunt for robin redbreasts and you 
will find robin redbreasts. One night an eagle and an owl got into a fierce 
battle; the eagle, unused to the night, was no match for an owl, which is most 
at home in the darkness, and the king of the air fell helpless ; but the morn- 
ing rose, and with it rose the eagle; and the owls and the night hawks and 
bats came a second time to the combat ; now, the eagle in the sunlight, with a 
stroke of his talons and a great cry, cleared the air, and his enemies, with torn 
feathers and splashed with blood, tumbled into the thicket. Ye are the children 
of light. In the night of despondency you will have no chance against your 
enemies that flock up from beneath, but trusting in God and standing in the 
sunshine of promise, you shall ' renew your youth like the eagle.' 

REMEMBER. YOUR. BLESSINGS 

" The habit of borrowing trouble is wrong because it has a tendency to 
make us overlook present blessings. To slake man's thirst, the rock is cleft, 
and cool waters leap into his brimming cup. To feed his hunger, the fields 
bow down with bending wheat, and the cattle come down with full udders from 
the clover pastures to give him milk, and the orchards yellow and ripen, casting 
their juicy fruits into his lap. Alas! that amid such exuberance of blessing 
man should growl as though he were a soldier on half rations, or a sailor on 
short allowance ; that a man should stand neck deep in harvests looking forward 
to famine; that one .should feel the strong pulses of health marching with reg- 
ular tread through all the avenues of life and yet tremble at the expected assault 
of sickness ; that a man should sit in his pleasant home, fearful that ruthless 
want will some day rattle the broken window-sash with tempest, and sweep the 
coals from the hearth, and pour hunger into the bread-tray; that a man fed by 
Him who owns all the harvests should expect to starve ; that one whom God 
loves and surrounds with benediction, and attends with angelic escort, and 
hovers over with more than motherly fondness, should be looking for a heritage 
of tears ! 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY in 

" The habit of borrowing trouble is wrong, because the present is sufficiently 
taxed with trial. I never look at my memorandum book to see what engage- 
ments and duties are far ahead. Let every week bear its own burdens. The 
shadows of to-day are thick enough ; why implore the presence of other shadows ? 
The cup is already distasteful; why halloo to disasters to come and wring out 
more gall into bitterness? Are we such champions that, having won the belt 
in former encounters, we can go forth to challenge all the future? 

"SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY" 

" Here are business men just able to manage affairs as they now are. They 
can pay their rent and meet their notes and manage affairs as they now are; 
but what if there should come a panic? Go to-morrow and write on your day- 
book, on your ledger, on your money safe, ' Sufficient unto the day is the evil 
thereof.' Do not worry about notes that are far from due. Do not pile up on 
your- counting-house desk the financial anxieties of the next twenty years. The 
God who has taken care of your worldly occupation, guarding your store from 
the torch of the incendiary and the key of the burglar, will be as faithful as 
ever. God's hand is mightier than the machinations of stock gamblers, or the 
plots of political demagogues, or the red right arm of revolution, ?nd the dark- 
ness will fly and the storm fall dead at his feet. 

A WORD TO VALETUDINARIANS 

" So there are persons in feeble health, and they are worried about the 
future. They make out very well now, but they are bothering themselves about 
the future pleurisies and rheumatisms and neuralgias and fevers. Their eye- 
sight is feeble, and they are worried lest they entirely lose it. Their hearing is 
indistinct, and they are alarmed lest they become entirely deaf. They felt chilly 
to-day, and are expecting an attack of typhoid. They have been troubled io\) 
weeks with some perplexing malady, and dread becoming life-long invalids. 
Take care of your health now, and trust God for the future. 

" Be not guilty of the blasphemy of asking Him to take care of you while 
you sleep with your window tight down, or eat chicken salad at eleven o'clock 
at night, or sit down on a cake of ice to cool off. Be prudent and then be con- 
fident. The habit of borrowing misfortune is wrong, because it unfits us for it 
when it actually does come. We cannot always have smooth sailing. Life's 
path will sometimes tumble among declivities and mount a steep and be thorn 
pierced. God has promised to take care of us. The Bible blooms with assur- 
ances. Your hunger will be fed; your sickness will be alleviated; your sorrow 
will be healed. God will sandal your feet and smooth your path, and along by 
frowning crag and opening grave sound the voices of victory and good cheer. 
Your way may wind along dangerous bridle-paths and amid wolf's howl and 
the scream of the vulture; but the way still winds upward till angels guard it, 



ii2 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

and trees of life overarch it, and thrones line it, and crystalline fountains leap 
on it, and the pathway ends at gates that are pearl, and streets that are gold, 
and temples that are always open, and hills that quake with perpetual song, and 
a city mingling forever jubilee and triumph and coronation." 

HAVE AN OBJECT IN LIFE 

It was part of his philosophy that life, to be worth living, must have an 
object clearly in view. 

" There is too much divine skill shown in the physical, mental, and moral 
constitution of the ordinary human being (he wrote) to suppose that he was 
constructed without any divine purpose. If you take me out on some vast plain 
and show me a pillared temple surmounted by a dome like St. Peter's, and 
having a floor of precious stones, and arches that must have taxed the brain of 
the greatest draughtsman to design, and walls scrolled and niched and paneled 
and wainscoted and painted, and I should ask you what this building was put 
up for, and you answered, ' For nothing at all,' how could I believe you? And 
it is impossible for me to believe that any ordinary human being, who has in 
his muscular, nervous and cerebral organization more wonders than Christopher 
Wren lifted in St. Paul's or Phidias ever chiseled on the Acropolis, and built in 
such a way that it shall last long after St. Paul's Cathedral is as much a ruin 
as the Parthenon — that such a being was constructed for no purpose and to exe- 
cute no mission and without any divine intention toward some end. 

" Take things as they are and decide the question so that you shall be 
able safely to say, ' To this end was I born.' How will you decide it? By direct 
application to the only Being in the universe who is competent to tell you — the 
Lord Almighty. He is the only Being who can see what has been happening 
for the last five hundred years in your ancestral line, and for thousands of 
years clear back to Adam, and there is not one person in all that ancestral line 
of six thousand years but has somehow affected your character, and even old 
Adam himself will sometimes turn up in your disposition. The only Being 
who can take all things that pertain to you into consideration is God. and he 
is the only one you can ask. Life is so short we have no time to experiment with 
occupations and professions. 

ONLY ONE WAY TO DECIDE 

" The reason we have so many dead failures is that parents decide for chil- 
dren what they shall do, or children themselves, wrought on by some whim or 
fancy, decide for themselves without any imploration of divine guidance. So 
it is that we have now in pulpits men making sermons who ought to be in 
blacksmith shops making plowshares, and we have in the law those who, instead 
of ruining the cases of their clients, ought to be pounding shoe lasts, and we 



DR. TALMAGE'S PHILOSOPHY 113 

have doctors who are the worst hindrances to their patients' convalescence, and 
artists trying to paint landscapes who ought to be whitewashing board fences, 
while there are others making bricks who ought to be remodeling constitutions, 
or shoving planes who ought to be transforming literatures. 

" Ask God about what worldly business you shall undertake, until you are 
so positive that you can in earnestness smite your hand on your plow handle, 
or your carpenter's bench, or your Blackstone's ' Commentaries,' saying, ' For 
this end I was born.' 

" There are those born for some especial work, and their fitness does not 
develop until quite late. When Philip Doddridge, whose sermons and books 
have harvested uncounted souls for glory, began to study for the ministry, Dr. 
Calamy, one of the wisest and best men, advised him to turn his thoughts to 
some other work. Isaac Barrow, the eminent clergyman and Christian scientist 
— his books standard now though he has been dead over two hundred years — 
was the disheartenment of his father, who used to say that if it pleased God to 
take any of his children away he hoped it would be his son Isaac. So some of 
those who have been characterized for their stupidity in boyhood or girlhood 
have turned out the mightiest benefactors of the human race. 

WHAT GOD DEMANDS 

" These things being so, am I not right in saying that in many cases God 
only knows what is the most appropriate thing for you to do, and he is the one 
to ask? Let all parents, and all schools, and all universities, and all colleges rec- 
ognize this, and then a large number of those who spend their best years in 
stumbling about among businesses and occupations, now trying this and now 
trying that, and failing in all, would be able to go ahead with a definite, decided 
and tremendous purpose. 

" Stand up, O man. and let me look you squarely in the face. Eyes capable 
of seeing everything. Ears capable of hearing everything. Hands capable of 
grasping everything. Mind with more wheels than any factory ever turned, 
more power than any Corliss engine ever displayed. A soul that will outlive 
all the universe except heaven, and would outlive all heaven if the life of other 
immortals were a moment short of the eternal. Now, what has the world a 
right to expect of you? "What has God a right to demand of you? God is the 
greatest of economists in the universe, and he makes nothing uselessly, and for 
what purpose did he build your body, mind and soul as they are built ? There 
are only two beings in the universe who can answer that question. The angels 
do not know. God knows and you ought to know. 

GRASP YOUR. OPPORTUNITY 

u Do not wait for extraordinary qualifications. Philip of Macedon gained 
his greatest victories seated on a mule, and if vou wait for some caparisoned 
8 



ii4 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



Bucephalus to ride into the conflict, you will never get into the world-wide fight 
at all. Samson slew the Lord's enemies with the jawbone of the stupidest beast 
created. Shamgar slew six hundred of the Lord's enemies with an ox-goad. 
Take all the faculty you have and say : ' O Lord ! Here is what I have, show 
me the field and back me up by omnipotent power.' Anywhere, anyhow, any time 
for God. Do not be satisfied with general directions. Get specific directions. 
Do not shoot at random. Take aim and fire. Concentrate. If there are 
sixteen hundred million people in the world, then there are sixteen hundred 
different missions to fulfil, different styles of work to do, different orbits in 
which to revolve, and if you do not get the divine direction there are at least 
fifteen hundred and ninety-nine million possibilities that you will make a mis- 
take." 





A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 

DR. TALMAGE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STORY OF HIS JOURNEYINGS IN PALESTINE, 

SYRIA, EGYPT AND OTHER ORIENTAL LANDS A REMARKABLE AND DELIGHTFUL 

NARRATIVE TOLD IN THE FORM OF A DIARY THE JOURNEY FROM NEW YORK 

TO JERUSALEM 

N his maturer years Dr. Talmage had a strong desire to write a Life of 
Christ. Not such a life as those that learned theologians, or erudite 
Orientalists have written, full of theories and scholarly deductions ; not 
a life written with the purpose of bolstering up some special creed or 
denominational doctrine ; but a life of the God-Alan, Jesus, picturing 
him as he actually lived here on earth, and revealing to the fullest extent the 
human side of his character which appeals most strongly to our own humanity. 
In these words of explanation the Doctor outlined his purpose: 

" In my American home, on the Atlantic, on the Mediterranean, on camel's 
back, on mule's back, on horseback, under chandelier, by dim candle in tent, on 
Lake Galilee, m convent, at Bethel where Jacob's pillow was stuffed with dreams, 
and the angels of the ladder landed ; at the brook Elah, from which little David 
picked up the ammunition of live smooth stones, four more than were needed 
for crushing like an egg-shell the skull of Goliath ; in the Valley of Ajalon, over 
which, at Joshua's command, Astronomy halted; on the plain of Esdraelon, the 
battlefield of ages, its long, red flowers suggestive of the blood dashed to the 
bits of the horses' bridles; amid the shattered masonry of Jerico ; in Jerusalem 
that overshadows all other cities in reminiscence ; at Cana, where plain water 
became festal beverage ; on Calvary whose aslant, ruptured rocks still show the 
effects of the earthquake at the awful hemorrhage of the five wounds that pur- 
chased the world's rescue, and with my hand mittened from the storm, or wet 
from the Jordan, or bared to the sun, or gliding over smooth table, this story 
of my travels in the Christ-Land has been written. 

" On the steamer, City of Paris, mid-ocean, a stranger, knowing I was on the 
way to the Holy Land, was overheard. to say: ' I hope Dr. Talmage will write 
a Life of Christ which a business man, getting home at eight o'clock at night 
and starting from home next morning at seven o'clock, may profitably take up, 
and in a few minutes before he starts and after he returns, read in snatches 

115 



n6 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



and understand.' So it shall be ! Not a word of Latin or Greek in all the 
book, unless it be translated. We shall tell the story in Anglo-Saxon, the lan- 
guage in which John Bunyan dreamed and William Shakespeare dramatized, and 
Longfellow romanced, and John Milton sang, and George Whitefield thundered. 
What is the use of dragging the dead languages into the service of such a book? 
Sailing on the Atlantic ocean, I asked where did all this water come from, and 
answered it by saying, 'The Hudson, the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the 
Amazon, the Seine, the Tagus, the Guadalquivir. And so I thought all the 
rivers of language, freighted with the thought of all lands and all ages, have 




TEMPI,ES OF PHILAE, ON THE NIEE 

emptied into the ocean of Anglo-Saxonism. Blessed to me was the hour when 
my mother taught how to frame the first sentence out of it. 

" I wrote my book for the masses. Who are the masses? The most of 
folks. They are the nine hundred and ninety-nine out of the thousand." 



SETTING OUT FOR THE ORIENT 

We must permit him to tell, in his own felicitous language, the story of his 
wanderings in Palestine. Never was a tour in the Orient so entertainingly 
recorded ; never were the scenes and incidents of travel in that fascinating country 
more happily and vividly spread upon the canvas, affording the imagination of 
the reader a feast of the purest enjoyment. 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



117 



This is a personal narrative, written by Dr. Talmage's own hand; and it is 

to be remembered that it was for the most part written at the moment, and 

describes the actual scenes as they passed, like hurrying panorama, before his 

eyes. 

* * * 

"Others might write a Life of Christ without seeing the Holy Land, but 
I could not. So in October, 1889, I embarked for that sacred country, accom- 
panied by my wife, daughter and friends, determined to see with my own eyes, 
and press with my own feet many of the memorable places connected with the 
life of the patriarchs and the ministrations of our Lord. We had crossed the 
Atlantic eight times before, but this was the smoothest of all our voyages — sun- 




PR. TAI.MAGE ON TH£ GREAT PYRAMID 



n8 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

shine from New York to Liverpool, sunshine from Liverpool to Rome, sun- 
shine from Rome to Athens, sunshine from Athens to Egypt. In a small boat, 
pitching till it threatened to capsize us, we come ashore at Patras, Greece, and 
take a railtrain for Corinth and Athens, amid skies blue as the bluest, and the 
sea a deep green, save where it is white-crested. 

" We enter now the realm of the classics. What an opportunity, if, at the 
close of college course and before entering a profession every young man could 
take a journey to see the places vividly associated with the birth, the life and the 
writings of the ancient poets, essayists and orators. May some philanthropist 
with large means see the opportunity and embrace it for hundreds and thou- 
sands of young students ! 

IN ST. PAULS COUNTRY 

" But now we rush along on a railtrain in regions where Paul went afoot. 
What a contrast between the fatigues and slowness of ancient travel, and the 
comforts and velocities of the modern journey ; the difference between weary 
limbs and ptarmigan's pinion. But why tarry at all on my way to Palestine 
amid these Pauline scenes? I want grandh to come upon the Christly places. 
Beside, Paul was only a sublime echo of Christ. Nothing but the divine occur- 
rences of Palestine could make the Apostle's life possible. There would have 
been no epistle to the Corinthians if there had been no sermon on the Mount. 
Mars' Hill was blood relation to Calvary. The spear that pierced the sacred 
side had answering flash in the beheading sword on the road to Ostia. The foot 




-^:P 



'JlmuMldltf' . 



PANORAMA OP ATHENS 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



119 



that bled on the hill back of Jerusalem was followed by the bleeding foot of the 
Pauline pilgrimage through this Grecian peninsula. 

"The scenery through which we are now riding is for grandeur absolutely 
appalling. No sooner does the Mediterranean subside at the beach, than the 
knolls become hills, and the hills mountains, and the mountains a volcanic bom- 
bardment of the heavens. Surely the stage on which martyrdoms were enacted 
was grand enough for the mighty tragedies ! 

"We come to Corinth. What a solemn place it is to me ! All the ancient 
city gone, but the Acro-Corinthus, the fortress two thousand feet high, still 
standing. It not only looks down upon a vast realm of scenery but looks down 
upon the ages. Paul's eyes were lifted toward that proud eminence as he came 
from the mobocracy of Athens. The fortress is a great heap of black basalt. O 
thou doomed and dead and buried Corinth ! Thy splendor was overpowered 
by thy dissoluteness. Yet all is quiet now, and, but for the clouds built like 
another Acro-Corinthus above the fortress, it is a rather peaceful scene, birds 
flying, sheep pasturing, peasant women sewing. It was the same landscape on 
which Paul looked in his gradual progress to martyrdom for Christ's sake." 



::- ^ 




^ l,v ... 



\/(.JM. ^ 



THEATRE OF DIONYSIUS 



120 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



One Sunday morning he had the unspeakable privilege of preaching to a 
large company of people on Mars' Hill. What a pulpit for such a preacher! 
There stood that day, in that august place, the preacher who had preached the 
Gospel of Christ to more people than any other minister since the days of 
Saint Paul, who gave to Mars' Hill a new immortality. Speaking of the Acrop- 
olis, Dr. Talmage gives us a glimpse of how much the sermon he preached 
there must have moved him : 

" But this secular classic of the Acropolis did not move me like the Gospel 
classic of Mars' Hill. What a bold man was Paul to stand there on those 
tumbled rocks and say what he did ! I suppose he could be heard across to the 
Acropolis, which was covered with temples to heathen gods and goddesses. An 

Englishman standing 
there said he heard dis- 
tinctly what I said while 
I was preaching on Mars' 
Hill. 

" As Paul's voice rang 
out over the valley, be- 
tween Mars' Hill and the 
Acropolis, he swung his 
hand toward that pile of 
heathen divinities and an- 
nounced his belief in only 
one divinity, saying : ' God 
that made the world and 
all things therein, seeing 
he is Lord of heaven and 
earth, dwelleth not in tem- 
ples made with hands.' 
And then, looking up at 
the glittering idols on the 
higher hill, he continues : 
' We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver 
or stone, graven by art and man's device; and the times of this ignorance 
God winked at, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent.' No 
wonder that meeting broke up in a riot, and that Paul had to clear out and 
go to Corinth, from which we came day before yesterday. It was not, yesterday 
afternoon, so much that the wind fluttered the leaves of my Bible as I was 
speaking about that address of Paul on Mars' Hill, as it was emotion that 
shook the book when that apostolic scene rose before my imagination. I 
obtained a block of stone from Mars' Hill to be sent to Brooklyn for the pulpit 
table in our new church, now building. But has this Paul nothing to do with 




RUINS 01? THE ACROPOUS, ATHENS 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 121 

the blessed One whose life I am trying to write ? Yes. Paul was Jesus Christ's 
man. Mars' Hill shall be to us only a stepping-stone to Golgotha.' 

"Yesterday I saw the Acropolis, and preached on Mars' Hill, and after 
dark went out and wandered among the fifteen immense pillars which are the 
Ikitnos and Kallikrates, the architects who planned it, and Phidias, who chiseled 
it, and Pericles, under whose patronage it was lifted." 

One of the pleasantest incidents of the Eastern journey was his meeting 
with the gracious Queen Olga of Greece. Dr. Talmage, in after years, fre- 
quently referred to this occurrence as one that had given him not only a sense 
of genuine pleasure, but had opened his eyes to the world-wide character of 
his ministry, Queen Olga having stated that she read his sermons every week 
in her own capital and in her own language. He wrote: 

A MEETING WITH ROYALTY 

" We were presented by Mr. Tricoupi, Prime Minister of Greece and the 
chief statesman of that kingdom, to the Queen of Greece, who gave us a most 
cordial grasp of the hand and welcomed us to Greece. The queen is a very 
beautiful and gracious woman, and we talked together as though we were 
old friends. We met also the ex-Empress of Germany, Fredericka. I was 
never so favorably impressed with any distinguished woman as with her. She 
had on not a single jewel, was in plain black, dignified, but not coldly so, with 
a countenance that indicated good sense and kindness, but it was a somewhat 
tearful face. This may have been partly due to the fact that she was leaving her 
newly-married daughter in Athens. But I think the sadness of the face was 
consequent upon the multitude of troubles through which she had passed, the 
long and terrible sickness and death of Frederick, and many other griefs, domes- 
tic and political. acrqss TH£ MEDITERRANEAN 

" Now we are on the Mediterranean Sea. This morning we sailed by 
Crete, the island spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles ; where Paul ' desired to 
winter,' and near which they met the euroclydon, by which they ' were driven 
up and down in Adria,' until shipwrecked. ■ Ye should not have loosed from 
Crete, and have gained this harm and loss.' The engineer of our boat told 
me that cyclones now are sometimes met in the same quarter. He says : ' The 
winds have a terrible sweep along that coast of Crete.' We are having a 
smooth sea, but there is a rocking and a narrowness of limits on shipboard 
which make me long for shore. There are Mohammedans on board. To-day 
at noon, regardless of spectators, they went through their devotions, first 
washing face and hands and feet, then reciting their prayers, kneeling and put- 
ting their foreheads to the rug which they had first spead beneath them. Their 
behavior is a rebuke to Christians who, under such circumstances, would neglect 
or postpone their devotions. Whatever else the Mohammedan neglects, he 
does not neglect his genuflexions. 



122 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




MODERN ATHENS 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



123 



THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF EGYPT 

" Now we enter Africa. Though a curse was of old pronounced upon 
those who went down into Egypt for help, it cannot be that the malediction was 
intended for those who go down into Egypt for help in writing a life of Christ. 
So I went. Some of our Lord's most important years were spent in Africa. 
What a morning was the 25th of November, 1899, for new and thrilling experi- 
ences, for then I first saw Egypt ! I landed at Alexandria amid a Babel of 
voices ; the boatmen clamoring for our luggage ; the Pasha, with his five wives, 




FISH 



TB 



\NKS OF THU NILE) 



descending the ladder on the side of the steamer ; custom-house officers on the 
alert; friends rushing ahead to greet friends; Europeans, Asiatics and Africans 
commingling. After a few hours' wandering about, and looking at Pompey's 
Pillar, which has stood as the sentinel of twenty-six centuries, and through the 
gardens of the Khedive, and through the streets filled with people of strange 
visage and costume, we sleep an hour to regain equilibrium before taking the 
train for Cairo. 



124 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" Now the train is rolling on through regions watered by canals and 
ditches that make the Nile the mightiest of aquatic blessings, through a country 
that otherwise would not yield food for one hungry man in all the land. We 
find here by irrigation the luxuries of an American farm just after a spring 
shower. These Egyptian lands, without a drop of rain direct from the heavens, 
have been drinking until they can drink no more. Thank God for water! 
Canals of it, rivers of it, lakes of it, oceans of it, all the cups of the earth, and 
all the bottles of the sky at times overflowing! We meet processions of men 
and beasts on the way home from the day's work. Camels, dromedaries, mules 
and cattle discharged of their burdens. But alas ! for the homes to which the 
poor inhabitants are going. For the most part, hovels of mud. But there is 
something in the scene that thoroughly enlists us. It is a novelty of wretched- 
ness, a scene of picturesque rags. For thousands of years this land has been 
under a very damnation of taxes. Nothing but Christian civilization will ever 
roll back the influences which are ' spoiling the Egyptians.' There are gardens 
and palaces, but they belong to the rulers. This is the land in which Joseph, 
and Mary, and Christ, were fugitives. 

TRACING CHRIST IN EGYPT 

" On the Mediterranean steamer coming from Athens to Alexandria, I 
met the eminent scholar and theologian, Doctor Lansing, who for thirty-five 
years has been a resident of Cairo, and he told me that he had been all over the 
road that the three fugitives took from Bethlehem to Egypt. He says it is a 
desert way, and that the forced journey of the infant Christ must have been a 
terrible journey. Going up from Egypt, Doctor Lansing met people from 
Bethlehem, their tongues swollen and hanging out from the inflammation of 
thirst, and although his party had but one goat-skin of water left, and that was 
important for themselves, he was so moved with the spectacle of thirst in these 
poor pilgrims that, though it excited the indignation of his fellow travelers, he 
gave water to the strangers. Over this dreadful route Joseph and Mary 
started for this land of Egypt. No time to make much preparation. Herod 
was after them, and what were these peasants before an irate king? Joseph, 
the husband and father, one night sprang up from his mattress in great alarm, 
the beads of sweat on his forehead, and his whole frame quaking. He had 
dreamed of massacres of his wife and babe. They must be off, that night, right 
away. Mary put up a few things hastily, and Joseph brought to the door the 
beast of burden and helped his wife and child to mount. Why, those loaves of 
bread are not enough, those bottles of water will not last for such a long way. 

" But there is no time to get anything more. Out and on. Good-by to 
the dear home they expect never again to see. Their hearts break. It does 
not need that ours be a big house in order to make us sorry to leave it. Over 
the hills and down through the deep gorge they urge their way. By Hebron, 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



125 




126 



T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AND WORK 



by Gaza, through hot sand, under a blistering sun, the babe crying, the mother 
faint, the father exhausted. How slowly the days and weeks pass. Will the 
weary three ever reach the banks of the Nile? Will they ever see Cairo? 
Will the desert ever end? When at last they cross the line beyond which old 
Herod has no right to pursue, their joy is unbounded. Free at last. Let them 
dismount and rest. Now they resume their way with less anxiety. They will 
find a place somewhere for shelter and the earning of their bread. 

" Here they are at Cairo, Egypt. They wind through the crooked streets. 




A GROUP OF WOMEN OF CAIRO 




A SCSNE IN DAVID STR££T, J£RUSAL£M 
The Thoroughfare Leads to the Tower of David, Now Used as a Turkish Barracks 



128 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

which are about ten feet wide, and enter the humble house where I have been 
to-day. It is nine steps down from the level of the street. It is such a place 
as no reader of this book would like to dwell in. I measured the room and 
found it twenty feet long, and seven and a half feet high. There are three 
shelvings of rock, one of which I think was the cradle of our Lord. There is 
no window, and all the light must have come from lantern or candle. What a 
place for the King of Heaven to live in ! 

" During the two or more years when this family of three made it their 
home, I suppose they occasionally walked forth and found many things looking 
about as I saw them to-day. As now, there stood the Sphinx with a cold smile, 
looking down upon the ages. It was old when the distinguished three arrived 
from Bethlehem in Egypt. It took three thousand years to make one wrinkle 
in its red cheek. It was then, as now, dreadful for its stolidity. Its eyes have 
never wept a tear. Its cold ears have not listened to the groans of the Egyp- 
tian nation, the sorrows of which have never ceased. Its heart is stone. It 
cared nothing for Joseph or Mary in the first century. It will care nothing for 
the man or woman who looks into its imperturbable countenance in the last 
century. 

THE PHARAOH OF THE EXODUS 

" We saw Pharaoh, the very one that oppressed the Israelites. His body 
lies in the museum at Cairo. Visible are the very teeth that he gnashed against 
the Israelitish brick-makers, the sockets of the merciless eyes with which he 
looked upon the overburdened people of God, the hair that floated in the 
breeze off the Red Sea, the very lips with which he commanded them to make 
bricks without straw. Thousands of years after, when the wrappings of the 
mummy were unrolled, old Pharaoh lifted up his arms as if in imploration, but 
his skinny bones cannot again clutch his shattered sceptre. 

" On a camel's back on the way to Memphis, Egypt, I am writing this. 
How many millions have crossed the desert on this style of beast ! Proud, 
mysterious, solemn, ancient, ungainly, majestic and ridiculous shape, stalking 
out of the past. The driver with his whip taps the camel on the fore-leg and 
he kneels to take you. But when he rises, hold fast, or you will first fall oft" 
backward as he puts his fore feet in standing position, and then you will fall 
off in front as his back legs take their place. Not a house or an inhabitant 
in all Memphis, though it was the mightiest city under the sun. I bring away 
a few stones from Pharaoh's palace, and recall, as well as I can, the once gor- 
geous capital of Egypt. 

SETTING OUT FOR CANAAN 

" From Memphis back again to Cairo, exhausted by travel, wearied by 
reflection on the mutations of the ages. But this morning, I especially thank- 
God for sleep. I feel rested and buoyant. Sleep puts a bound to weariness. 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



129 




r A VISIT TO TH^ SPHINX 



130 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

It says: 'Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.' It pours light into the eyes 
and geniality into the disposition and faith into the heart and makes a new 
world every morning. And now just think of it ! We start out of Egypt for 
Canaan, the way the Israelites went thousands of years ago. But they went 
afoot, we with flying express train; they fugitive slaves, we American freemen; 
they amid the hardships that slew most of them, we amid the luxuries of modern 
travel for recuperation and sight-seeing. What a compliment to modern civ- 
ilization and the principles of liberty which have begun to range the world ! 
No ; I can put it in a more righteous way : what obligation we are under to the 
blessed God and our glorious Christianity! Farewell, land of Pharaoh and 
Joseph and Jacob, and the regions through which the infant Christ passed both 
ways, from Palestine to Egypt, and from Egypt to Palestine ! 

IN THE LAND OF GOSHEN 

" Now we are passing through Goshen, the land into which Pharaoh turned 
Jacob's cattle. It is still flowing with milk and honey. Where the grass ends 
the crops begin. Cattle browsing, camels laden on the way to the markets, 
palm trees and cactus, acacia and sycamore, line the way. Some of the dark- 
faced farmers gathering the old crops, others planting for new crops. ' So the 
ploughman overtakes the reaper.' But this verdant and foliaged farm scene is 
surrounded by desert, and into that we pass and arrive at Tel-el-Kebir, the great 
battlefield where the English, under Wolseley, and the Egyptians met, and from 
which field the only harvest ever reaped was an awful harvest of immortal men. 
Over these sands, not in this balmy atmosphere, but in consuming summer, the 
hosts of Englishmen marched and fought and fainted and died. On one side 
is a fenced and shaded cemetery, with marble headstones, in which many of the 
officers sleep the last sleep. But many of the troops, the thousands of private 
soldiers, who had fathers and mothers and wives and sisters and children, are 
in trenches, where they were tumbled, far away from home and without a praver. 
The siroccos of this African desert will make playthings of the skeletons of 
the fallen cohorts. 

" Now we are on the Suez Canal. I am impressed all along this route with 
the fact that in eight days the Israelites would have reached Canaan if they had 
gone straight, though it took them forty years. But it was best that thev be 
lost in the wilderness. They were a nation of slaves, and had they gone into 
Canaan thus undisciplined and unorganized, the nations of Canaan would have 
made onlv one meal of them. But they had forty years of schooling and became 
developed heroes, and then were ready in the name of the God of Israel to defy 
and rout opposing hosts. 

ARRIVAL AT JOPPA 

" We arrive at Joppa. Last night we made our exit from Egypt and have 
come throusrh the sea drv-shod, and are now about to enter the ' Promised 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



131 



Land ' through the gates of Joppa. The sea is as smooth as a polished floor, 
although the harbor has the worst reputation for shipwrecks. The guide-books 
and all the tourists have prophesied a terrible debarkation at this place. The 
bottom of this harbor, they tell us, is strewn with human bones. Fifteen years 
ago a boat with twenty-seven pilgrims went down. But we personally know 
nothing against the harbor of Joppa. Hardly a ripple on the sea. Floods of 
sunshine. May all the rough stories about death prove in our cases as untrue, 
and our entrance into the promised land of heaven be as placid ! May it be a 
radiant harbor ! We are ashore, and are met by people of many nationalities. 
While I am writing this, the air is full of fragrance, gardens all a-bloom, though 
the first of December, and we are surrounded by acacia, tamarisk, oleander, palm, 
mulberry, century plant and orange groves, the oranges either ripe or ripening, 
the orange tree in March having both fruit and blossom, and all the year round 
in foliage, so that it fulfils the prophecy, ' Their leaf also shall not wither.' " 




VEGETABLE SKIERS NKAR CAIRO 



132 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



In his journeyings up and down the hills and valleys of the Holy Land, 
Dr. Talmage was greatly struck with the floral beauty of the country. His rich 
imagination revelled in the thought that these fragrant blossoms were the descend- 
ants of those which the Saviour had immortalized by frequent reference to them 
in his parables and teachings, when he had used them as object-lessons. Writ- 
ing home about this time, Dr. Talmage inscribed this beautiful tribute to the 
flowers of Palestine : 




TRADITIONAL HOUSE OF SIMON THE TANNER 




AN ARAB DOCTOR AND HIS PATIENT, EGYPT 



134 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

"The ancestors of these flowers were touched by Moses and Solomon, and 
Paul and Christ. Through the most of the year, the Holy Land is all ablush 
with floral opulence. You find all the royal family of flowers there, some that 
you supposed indigenous to the far Xorth, and others indigenous to the far 
South — the daisy and hyacinth, crocus and anemone, tulip and water-lily, ger- 
anium and ranunculus, mignonette and sweet marjoram. In the collection at 
Beyrout, you may see eighteen hundred kinds of Holy Land flowers; while 
among trees are the oak of frozen climes, and the tamarisk of the tropics, walnut 
and willow, ivy and hawthorn, ash and elder, pine and sycamore. 

" Oh, the flowers ! They are the angels of the grass ! They all have voices ! 
When the clouds speak, they thunder; when the whirlwinds speak, they shriek; 
when the cataracts speak, they roar; hut when the flowers speak, they always 
whisper. Some of the flowers have different names now from those with which 
they were baptized in Bible times, but the change of name has not changed 
their beauty or aroma or suggestiveness. The flowers mark the exact line 
between the material world and the spiritual world. Heaven and earth meet at 
the white pillar of the calla-lily." 

A REMINDER. OF JONAH 

" We this morning disembarked where Jonah embarked. How vividly now 
the story comes to mind! God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, and declining that 
call, he came here to Joppa. I have been consulting some weeks past with 
tourist companies as to how I could take Nineveh on this trip. The}' have not 
encouraged me to go. It is a most tedious route and a desert. Xow I see an 
additional reason why Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. Lie not only 
revolted because of the disagreeable message he was called to deliver at Nineveh, 
but because it was a long way, and rough and bandit-infested. So he came 
here to Joppa and took ship. But alas ! for the disastrous voyage. Why people 
should doubt the story of Jonah and the whale, is more a mystery than the 
Bible event itself. The same thing has occurred a thousand times. The Lord 
always has a whale waiting outside the harbor for a man who starts in the 
wrong direction. Recreant Jonah ! I do not wonder that even the whale was 
sick of him. 

" Now the sun is sinking behind the hills, and my first clay in Palestine is 
closing. Never will I forget Joppa, the city by the sea, city of architecturaled 
hills ; city where Dorcas immortalized her needle and conquered death on her 
own pillow ; and city where the two dreams of Peter and Cornelius met ; and 
where Napoleon on the retreat had his sick soldiers poisoned, because he could 
not take them down through Egypt ; city at whose harbor floated the timber- 
rafts for two temples, the ox-teams drawing through these streets the cedars for 
Jerusalem. 

" To-day, I have seen floating the American flag, the English flag, the Rus- 
sian flag, the Turkish flag, and the Mohammedan dropping his forehead to the 



A SACRED PILGRIMAGE 



135 





r 



136 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



earth in devotion, and all nations on the streets of one of the strangest cities 
I ever beheld. 

" This morning, for the first time, I have seen a man ' take up his bed and 
walk.' He had slept out of doors, and now he rolls together a blanket and pillow 
and a mattress, with a cord binds them securely, and then shoulders the bundle, 
which he easily carries away. 

" I am glad that we came now instead of some years hence, when much of the 
religious romance will have been banished forever. A banker of Joppa. assisted 
by others, is about to begin to build a railroad from Joppa to Jerusalem. 
When this railroad is done, the steam whistle will be heard at Joppa, and the 
conductor's cry, ' All aboard for Jerusalem ! ' Then branch roads will be built, 
and the cry will be, ' Twenty minutes for dinner at Nazareth/ ' Change cars for 
Damascus,' ' All out for the Grand Trunk to Nineveh/ and camel and mule and 
dragoman will go their way, and lightning wheel will be substituted for hoof 
and diligence! 

ON TO THE "HOLY CITY" 

" Now it is Monday morning, and we are on the way to Jerusalem. Along 
the route I am amazed beyond expression at the boldness and jaggedness of the 
scenery of the Holy Land. I expected to see it rough, but not Alpinian and 
Sierra Nevadian in grandeur. The hills are amphitheatres, piled-up galleries of 
gray rock, with intervals of soil brown and maroon, until the eye and head and 
heart surrender, and the lips, that for a long time were exclamatory, become 
speechless. 

" Before sundown we will see Jerusalem, 
of seeing any place as of seeing the Holy City, 
sal em, my happy home,' while dressing myself this morning. I think my feel- 
ings may be slightly akin to that of the Christian just about to enter the 
Heavenly Jerusalem. My ideas regarding the earthly Jerusalem are bewil- 
dering. Have I not seen pictures of it? Oh, yes. but they have only increased 
the bewilderment. They were taken from a variety of standpoints. If twenty 
artists attempt to picture Brooklyn or New York, they will plant their cameras 
at different places and take as many different pictures. I must see the city with 
my own eves. I must walk around about it, and * tell the towers thereof/ " 



I never had such expectations 
I found mvself singing ' leru- 




f 3 ®*^ 



'^y~0r^ k ' 




IN THE HOLY LAND 

HOLDING A SERVICE: ON MOUNT CALVARY — THE GREAT TEMPLE — A JORDAN BAPTISM 

BETHLEHEM VISITED JACOBUS WELL THE GOOD SAMARITAN TAVERN THE 

WINE POTS OP CANA — ON LAKE GALILEE — DAMASCUS, BEYROUT AND HOME 



ERUSALEM, the " Holy City," beautiful for situation and the joy of 
the whole earth, was the focal point of Dr. Talmage's Eastern pilgrim- 
^k age. His anticipations, cherished for long years, rose higher as he 
neared the Sacred City. We quote again from his autobiographical 
journey, beginning at the point before he tells of the service he held 
on Mount Calvary : 
" Arrived in Jerusalem, the first place we seek is Mount Calvary. This noon- 
day hour on Golgotha is the most solemn and overwhelming hour of my life. It 
is impossible for you to realize what our emotions were as we gathered, a group 
of men and women, all saved by the blood of the Lamb, on a bluff of Calvary, just 
wide enough to contain three crosses. I said to my family and friends : ' I think 
here is where stood the cross of the impenitent burglar, and there the cross of 
the penitent miscreant, and here, between, stood the cross on which all our hopes 
depend.' As I opened to the nineteenth chapter of John to read, a chill blast 
struck the hill and a cloud hovered, and a natural solemnity deepened the spiritual 
solemnity. I read a little but broke down. I tried to read two of the Bible 
accounts of the Crucifixion, but it was done with many pauses. I defy any Chris- 
tian man, sitting upon Golgotha, to read with firm voice and consecutive utterance 
the description given by Luke and John of the mightiest scene of all the ages 
which was enacted here. Our group lying down on the places where the three 
crosses stood, I read to them, and I think the prayer of the penitent malefactor 
became the prayer of each one of us. ' Lord, remember me.' It was about this 
hour that the sun was darkened and midnight fell on midnoon. There can be no 
doubt that this hill above the place heretofore called ' Jeremiah's Grotto ' is the 
hill on which Christ was put to death. The late General Gordon has made a 
mold of this hill, and the opinion being adopted by nearly all who visit Jerusalem 
in these days is that the hill on which we now sit was the place of the Great 
Tragedy. The New Testament calls the locality of execution, Golgotha, or the 
' Place of a skull/ I care not from what direction you look at this hill, you rec- 
ognize the shape of a human skull — you have but to feel of your own cranium to 




A MODERN PALESTINE PATRIARCH 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



139 



realize the contour of Calvary. The caverns a little way beneath the top suggest 
eyeless sockets. The grotto underneath is also the shape of the inside of a skull. 
This hill is the only hill anywhere near Jerusalem that corresponds with the Bible 
description of being skull-shaped. We have inspired authority for saying that 
Christ was crucified outside the gate. This hill is just outside the Damascus Gate. 
Moreover, all traditions agree that this hill I speak of was the place where male- 
factors in olden time were put to death, and Christ was executed as a malefactor. 




MOUNT CALVARY 



The Bible lets us know that the Hill of Calvary was near a great thoroughfare, 
the people passing by ' wagging their heads.' This hill was then, as it is now, 
beside a great thoroughfare. 

" In pamphlets and books those arguments are now appearing, and all 
intelligent people will yet agree upon this 'Place of a skull* as the centre from 
which continents have been touched and from which all the world will yet be 



140 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



moved. So certain am I of this, that to-day with my own hands 1 have rolled 
down from this hill a stone which I shall take to America as a memorial stone for 
my new church now building. 




PEASANTS OP THE ENVIRONS OP GAZA PREPARING COPPEE 



IN THE HOLY LAND 141 

" What a place of interest is Jerusalem, whichever way we look ! It is the 
most sacred city of our planet. There is much squalor here now, but the present 
is, in my mind, overwhelmed with the past. The procession of kings, conquerors, 
poets and immortal men and women pass before me as I stand here. Among the 
throng are Solomon, David and Christ. Yes, through these streets and amid 
these surroundings rode Solomon, that wonder of splendor and wretchedness. It 
seemed as if the world exhausted itself on that man. To say that Solomon was 
a millionaire gives but a very imperfect idea of the property he inherited from 
David, his father. He had at his command gold and silver in amounts that 
stagger all arithmetic. About his exact wealth authors have differed, but all 
agree that it was far ahead of any other man's possessions, beyond all modern 
millionairedom. The Queen of Sheba made him a nice little present of seven 
hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and Hiram made him a present of the same 
amount. 

" But here passes through these streets, as in imagination I see him, quite 
as wonderful and a far better man, David, the conqueror, the king, the poet. 
Can it be that I am in the very city where he lived and reigned? Yes, I have 
since coming here stood in the very place where he received the news of Absalom's 
death. He was wrapped up in his boy Absalom. He was a splendid boy, 
judged by the rules of worldly criticism. From the crown of his head to the sole 
of his foot there was not a single blemish. The Bible says that he had such a 
luxuriant shock of hair that when once a year it was shorn, that which was cut. 
off weighed over three pounds. But, notwithstanding all his brilliancy of 
appearance, he was a bad boy, and broke his father's heart. 

THE GREAT TEMPLE 

" I am thrilled and overpowered with the remembrance that yonder, where 
now stands a Mohammedan mosque, stood the Temple, the very one that Christ 
visited. Solomon's Temple had stood there, but Nebuchadnezzar thundered it 
down. Zerubbabel's Temple had stood there, but that had been prostrated. Then 
Herod built a temple because he was fond of great architecture, and he wanted 
the preceding temples to seem insignificant. Put eight or ten modern cathedrals 
together and they would not equal that structure. It covered nineteen acres. 
There were marble pillars supporting roofs, and cedar and silver tables on which 
stood golden cups, and there were carvings exquisite, and inscriptions resplendent, 
glittering balustrades, and ornamental gateways. The building of this temple 
kept ten thousand workmen busy forty-six years. Stupendous pile of pomp 
and magnificence ! But the material and architectural grandeur of the building 
were very tame compared with the spiritual meaning of its altars, its Holy of 
Holies, and the overwhelming significance of its ceremonies. 

" Now we are on the road from Terusalem to Jericho. We started out early 
and crossed the Jehosaphat valley, which, if it had not been memorable in history 



142 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




'";?— Eg 



' 



v 




...'.... 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



143 



and were only now discovered, would excite the admiration of all who look upon 
it, so deep, so wide, so long, so tunneled with graves, so overlooked by Jerusalem 
walls. With enough books in my saddle-bags, on a horse sure-footed for the 
mountain passes, and in good company, and within sight of Mount Olivet, and 
close by the Garden of Gethsemane, and with the heavens and the earth full of 
sunshine, we start on the famous road to Jericho. We pass through ravines and 
gorges, and by dark caves which might be an entrenchment for robbers like those 
which the man fell among on his way to Jericho along this very road. We have 
to-day met several groups of Bedouins, who, judging from their countenances, 




JACOB s WEU, 



might be easily turned into bandits. But the supremacy of law, even though it 
be Turkish law, and our accompaniment of twelve stout men, escorts and attend- 
ants, put us out of the danger of being, like that previous traveler, stripped and 
wounded and left half dead. What scenery we are passing through ! How any 
man can be disappointed with the Holy Land I cannot understand. Some of the 
Palestine tourists have been chiefly impressed with the fleas, the filth and the beg- 
gars. To me the scenery, if it had no sacred associations, would be appallingly 



144 T. DH WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

majestic. There is nothing in America or Europe that surpasses it for a mingling 
of beauty and grandeur. 

WHERE THE RAVENS FED ELIJAH 

" ' What is that ravine? ' I cried out to the dragoman. He says, ' That is the 
brook Cherith, here is where the ravens fed Elijah.' ' Are there any ravens in this 
region now ? ' I asked. ' Yes ; they are large, in size between the buzzard and the 
eagle, and could carry a heavy piece of meat if they tried/ 

" But how different is the brook Cherith from all my preconceived notions of 
it. It is like one of the awful gulches in Yellowstone Park. It is six hundred 
feet from the top of the bank. It has in its sides great caverns, where Bedouins 
make their home. The brook Cherith when in full force is a silver wedge splitting 
the mountains into precipices. But behold the valley of the Jordan and the Dead 
Sea bursting upon our vision, and in an hour we are at the two Jerichos, the one 
where at the sound of the poor music played on ' rams' horns/ the walls crashed, 




--■*■/. :.[. .;;:;-:.'Xv: : : : ' : -.v-" ,; '- :i '- i '. 




m 




ffRAVI&SRS AT TH£ PLAIN OF JERICHO 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



145 



and the other Jericho where short Zaccheus from the gallery of a sycamore tree 
hailed the Lord, and the Lord hailed him. It was here our Saviour so beautifully 
announced his mission, ' The Son of Man is come to seek and save that which was 
lost.' By the warmth of a camp-fire I sit down to write this, and looking up see 
the Quarantania, the mountain of Christ's temptation. I am at the foot of that 
' very high mountain ' where Christ was ' led by the Spirit ' to be tempted. 
Neither on the sides of it nor on the top is there a spear of grass or a flower. 
It is a desert mountain. Its robber dens are here visible. Amid these inden- 
tations and on the cold bleak heights, and alone, save when angels came to minister 
unto him, Christ stayed in that awful struggle against pandemoniac cohorts which 
rode up to trouble and baffle and destroy, if they could, the Son of God. A 
depression on either side of the mountain seems to divide it from the other 
ranges so that the mountain is itself alone. 

" And now the sun is setting, making the mountains look like balustrades 
and embattlements of amber and gold, and the moon just above the crests seems 
to be a window of heaven through which immortals might be looking down upon 
the scene. 




GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE 



IO 



146 T. DE WITT TAEMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

BAPTIZING AN AMERICAN IN THE JORDAN 

" Yesterday, 011 horseback, we left Jericho, and having dipped in the Dead 
Sea, we came with a feeling that we cannot describe upon the Jordan, a river 
which more people have desired to see than any other. On our way we overtook 
an American, who requested me to baptize him by immersion in the river Jordan. 
We dismounted at the place where Joshua and his host crossed the river dry-shod. 
We were near a turn in the river and not far off from where rocks and sands 
are piled up in shape of cathedrals, domes and battlements. We pitched our tent, 
and after proper examination of the candidate for baptism, I selected portions of 
the Scripture appropriate. One of our Arab attendants had a garment not unlike 




JERUSALEM FROM MOUNT SCOPUS 

a baptismal robe. With that garment girdled around me, I led the candidate 
down under the trees on the bank, while near by were groups of friends and some 
strangers who happened to be there. After a prayer, I read of Christ's baptism 
in the Jordan, and the commission ' Go teach all nations, baptizing them.' The 
people on the bank joined in singing, to the familiar tune, that soul-stirring song: 

' On Jordan's stormy bank I stand.' 
With the candidate's hand in mine, we waded deep into the Jordan, and I then 
declared, ' In this historical river, where Israelites crossed, and Naaman plunged 
seven times for the cure of his leprosy, and Christ was baptized, and which has 
been used in all ages as a symbol of the dividing line between earth and heaven, 




A BAPTISM BY DR. TALMAG3 IN THE) JORDAN 



148 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

I baptize thee in the name of the Father, ahd of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, 
amen.' As the candidate went down under the waves and then rose, I felt a 
solemnity that no other scene could have inspired. 

" On our way up from Jericho to Jerusalem the sun was very hot. I got 
off and sat under the shadow of the horse. I felt as if I could not ride another 
step, but the dragoman informed us that a little way off was a cool place. Soon 
we halted by a ledge of rocks, the mountain was between us and the sun, and 
threw a sombre blanket over us. And three or four of us spontaneously cried 
out : ' This is the shadow of a great rock in a weary land ! ' 

A VISIT TO BETHLEHEM 

" Now we are back again in Jerusalem, and must make an excursian to our 
Lord's birthplace. I was determined to see Bethlehem in the same month in which 
Jesus arrived. At nine o'clock this crisp December morning, for there was a sharp 
frost last night, I am afoot on the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem; I have just 
crossed the valley of Hinnom. It is deep and impressive, a wall of rock on one 
side and a steep hill on the other, mounting towards the Holy City, a few olive 
trees on the way up as though they had climbed as far as they could, and then 
halted. I pass the plain where Absalom marshaled troops against his father 
David, and the hill of Evil Counsel, where Judas planned for the capture of 
Christ. I am on the road where the wise men went to find the Christ at the order 
of Herod, men wise enough not to make report to the cruel monster. It is the 
road that marks the distance between the birth-place and the death-place of Him 
who made the world and will yet redeem it. Christ made long journeys, but after 
all, died within five miles of his early home. I meet on the road many camels with 
heavy burdens, on their way to Jerusalem. These animals set one thinking as 
does no other creature, and I enjoy meeting them on foot better than I enjoyed 
riding upon their backs. 

" But now Bethlehem is in sight, and we are toiling up the hills which Joseph 
and Mary ascended in this same month of December, long, long years ago. The 
town of Bethlehem, to my surprise, is in the shape of a horseshoe, the houses 
extending clear on to the prongs of the horseshoe, between which I look and see 
the fields where Ruth gleaned and Boaz was fascinated with her charms, and 
about which is garlanded the immortal pastoral which, in the Bible, lies peace- 
fully between the war lyrics of Judges and Samuel. Near one end of the semi- 
circle of rocks on which Bethlehem stands is David's Well, now a wide, deep 
basin of stone, almost dry, but at certain seasons almost full. Xo wonder that 
when David was hounded of persecution and thirsty, he wanted a cool draught 
out of it, crying, ' Oh, that one would give me to drink of the water of the well of 
Bethlehem which is by the gate.' The mouth of the well cut out of the eternal 
rock is about four feet across from edge to edge, and a wet goat-skin bottle was 
lying nearby. 



IN THE HOLY LAND 149 

" Now we leave Jerusalem for the long journey north through Palestine. A 
little way out we got on a hill and took the last look at Jerusalem, and I felt and 
remarked it was the last look at that sacred city on earth and the next Jerusalem 




TH£ SILVER STAR OF THE NATIVITY, BETHLEHEM 



i5.o 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



we shall see will be the heavenly. We went on within sight of Mizpah and 
Gibeon, where Joshua commanded the sun to stand still ; on by Rama, connected 
with Samuel's history ; on by the traditional village where the parents of Christ 
missed their boy, about three and a half miles from Jerusalem. This is the road 

over which Jesus came and 
went from Jerusalem to Naza- 
reth. To-night we encamp at 
Bethel, where was once a school 
of the prophets, a theological 
seminary. Elijah and Elisha 
were here. Near this, Abra- 
ham and Lot divided the land. 
Here Jacob, pillowed on a stone, 
saw the ladder used by angels' 
feet, and he set up a stone and 
consecrated it. To-night the 
heavens were full of ladders, 
first a ladder of clouds, then a 
ladder of stars, and all up and 
down the heavens are the 
angels of beauty, angels of con- 
solation, angels of God ascend- 
ing and descending. ' Surelv 
God is in this place,' said Jacob, 
1 and I know it not.' But to- 
night God is in this place and I 
know it ! 

THE TOMB OF JOSEPH 

" The next day we saw the 

tomb of Joseph. His bones 

were brought up from Egypt. 

Gentile and Jew, Protestant and 

Catholic, and Mohammedan, 

agree that this is the place of 

that Prime Minister's burial. 

What a funeral it must have 

been and what a procession 

from Egypt to Canaan ! 

" We dismounted from our horses in a heavy rain, at ' Jacob's Well,' and 

our dragoman on the slippery stones nearly fell into the deep chasm of this most 

memorable of all the wells ever digged. I measured the well at the top and 

found it six feet from edge to edge. Some grass and weeds and thorny growths 





CHRISTIAN GIRT, OF BFYROUT, SYRIA 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



151 



overhang it. In one place the roof is broken through. Large stones embank 
the well on all sides. Our dragoman took pebbles and dropped them in, and 
from the time they left his hand to the instant they clicked on the bottom you 
could hear it was very deep. It is a rich region of land, ' the parcel of ground ' 
that Jacob gave to his son Joseph, and I do not wonder the old patriarch bought 
it, for it is a farm field of great luxuriance, and however much he. paid for it he 
got it cheap. Within sight as we stood at the well were Mount Gerizim and 









QUARANTANIA MOUNTAIN 



Mount Ebal, each eight hundred feet high, the mountains of cursing and 
blessing. 

" The woman of Samaria, who met Christ at this well, told the truth, as 
my own eyesight testifies, when she said, ' The well is deep,' and no wonder she 
cried out, ' Thou hast nothing to draw with.' She knew not that Christ was 
speaking of spiritual supply. For that well God gives everyone a pail if he will 
only let it down into the floods. Within fifteen minutes of Jacob's Well is the 
village called Sychar, to which the disciples had gone when the woman of Samaria 
came to the well, as he in the heat of twelve o'clock at noon asked to have his 



5 2 



T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AND WORK 



thirst slaked. The topography of the surroundings of this well and of other 
localities visited this week, led me to say then what I feel now : ' Any man who 
goes through Palestine and remains an infidel, is either a bad man or an imbecile/ 



AT THE WELL OF DOTHAN 

" Six o'clock in the morning. Last night I heard a hyena. Its voice is a 
loud, resounding, terrific, almost supernatural sound, splitting up the darkness 
into a deeper midnight. Beginning with a howl and ending with a sound some- 
thing like a horse's whinnying. Here we are, squat by a fire, under the starlight 
with two Arabs, I knowing as much of Arabic as they of English, namely, nothing. 
Skies above the mountains of Samaria crimsoning with the morning. A few 

hours pass and we come to the 
well of Dothan, mentioned in 
Bible story. Cattle, donkeys, 
camels at the well. Women 
with pitchers on their heads or 
lowering their vessels to have 
them filled. Men with pails 
attached to strings struggling 
in pleasantry. The water 
plashing over the stones, while 
caravans of camels just ar- 
rived wearily lie down with 
a grunt and wait their turn for 
water. In the trough girding 
the well the mouths of beasts 
are thrust thirstily. There is 
Rachel watering the camels. 
There are young men and 
maidens looking at each other, roughly bewitching. There are herdsmen angry 
with each other and ready to strike, and looking daggers because some other 
camel, or cow, or calf, or donkey than their own has won precedence at the 
trough. 

" Next we arrive at Gideon's Fountain, where the men lapped the water as 
they crossed. Out of an archway of rock the water bubbles. Yonder is Mount 
Gilboa, where Saul and his two sons died. This is the valley of Jezreel, through 
which Jehu drove furiously. To-day we are in sight of Mount Carmel. It looks 
like rain, after a drought ; clouds larger than a man's hand drifting across the top 
of Carmel. From a great height the mountain, first precipitately, then gradually, 
declines into the Mediterranean Sea. 

" As our caravan moved on at seven o'clock in the morning, through a village, 
we saw about fifty women, dressed mostly in black, on their way out of a grave- 




EN ROUTE TO THE JORDAN 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



153 



yard ; others were still seated by the graves, and were crying, * Oh, my mother ! 
Oh, my husband! Oh, my child! Oh, my father! ' Our dragoman informed us 
that this was the continuance of a very old custom. The bereft women go at 
day-dawn to the grave, three mornings after a burial, and after that every week 
for a year. ' There it is,' I said. ' Turn over and read in Luke and John, ' Very 
early in the morning they came unto the sepulchre.' " 

Dr. Talmage held a service of unique interest on the road to Jericho, where 
the party of tourists with which he was traveling had pitched their tents under the 
shadow of an old tavern supposed to be the very one that Jesus had in his mind 
when he told the story of the Good Samaritan. To the assembled tourists, Dr. 
Talmage read the old story, and what new, vivid interest there must have been 
in it under such circumstances ! He 
has sriven us a brief condensation of 





his comments at the time: 

THE TAVERN OF THE GOOD 
SAMARITAN 

" As on that December noon we sat 
under the shadow of the tavern where 
this scene of mercy had occurred, and 
just having passed along the road 
where the tragedy had happened, I 
could plainly see that Bible story re- 
enacted, and I said aloud to our group 
under the tent : ' One drop of practi- 
cal Christianity is worth more than a 
temple full of ecclesiasticism ; and the 
good Samaritan had more religion 
in five minutes than that minister and 
that Levite had in a lifetime. The 
most accursed thing on earth is na- 
tional prejudice, and I bless God that I live in America, where Gentile and Jew, 
Protestant and Catholic, can live together without quarrel, and where, in the 
great national crucible, the different sects and tribes and peoples are being 
molded into a great brotherhood. I bless God that the question which the 
lawyer flung at Christ, and which brought forth this incident of the goocfSamari- 
tan, ' Who is my neighbor? ' is bringing forth the answer, ' My neighbor is the 
first man I meet in trouble,' and a wound close at hand calls louder than a temple 
seventeen miles off, though it be the most glorious ever built and though it 
covers nineteen acres. 

THE BOYHOOD HOME OF JESUS 

" Now we are at Nazareth, the place of the Saviour's boyhood. We came 
along the very road that Christ took when he returned from Jerusalem after his 



-,-^ 



ON MOUNT OLIVET 



154 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIKE AND WORK 



interview with the doctors of the law. Through the Valley of Esdraelon, the 
battlefield of nations, and by round-topped, beautiful Tabor, from the edge of 
which Deborah signaled Barak to open the battle; and near awful Megiddo, and 
across the plains the road comes to the foot of Mount Nazareth, not ascending 
by the steep and jagged path which Christ ascended, but by a new way which 
modern engineering has built, and we go zigzagging up the heights, steep above 
steep, until we seem to hover over Nazareth, a village of such overpowering 
interest that all the world has seen or wishes to see it. How the Omnipotent 
has scooped out these valleys and molded these hills on which and through which 
Jesus, the lad, walked, sometimes with his father, sometimes with his mother, 

sometimes with village con- 
temporaries, and sometimes 
alone. We halt at the very 
fountain where Joseph and 
Mary and Jesus used to fill the 
goat-skins. We stop for the 
night at a Russian convent, 
and for the first time in many 
nights have a pillow in-doors. 
Before dark I open my Bible 
and within sight of the hills to 
which the young Christ so 
often looked up, while they 
•looked down, I read the story 
of Jesus of Xazareth, which 
appears so vivid and strange 
and new. it seems as if I had 
never read it before. 

WHERE CHRIST WALKED 

" In traveling along the 
roads of Palestine, I am im- 
pressed as I could not other- 
wise have been, with the fact that Christ, for the most part, went afoot. We 
find him occasionally on a boat, and once riding in a triumphal procession, as it 
is sometimes called, although it seems to me that the hosannas of the crowd could 
not have made a ride on a stubborn, unimpressive and funny creature like that 
which pattered with him into Jerusalem very much of a triumph. But generally 
he walked. How much that means only those know who have gone over the dis- 
tances traversed by Christ. We are accustomed to read that Bethany is two miles 
from Jerusalem. Well, any man in ordinary health can walk two miles without 
fatigue, but not more than one man out of a thousand can walk from Bethany to 
Jerusalem without exhaustion. It is over the Mount of Olives, and vou must 




BY THE DEAD SEA 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



155 



climb up among - the rolling stones and descend where exertion is necessary to keep 
you from falling prostrate. I, who am accustomed to walk ten or twelve miles 
without lassitude, tried part of this road over the Mount of Olives, and confess 
I would not want to try it often, such demand does it make upon one's physical 
energies. Yet Christ walked it twice a day, in the morning from Bethany to 
Jerusalem, and in the evening from Jerusalem to Bethany. Likewise it seems a 
small thing that Christ walked from Nazareth to Jerusalem, but it takes us four 
days of hard horseback riding, sometimes on a trot and sometimes on a gallop, to 




GROUP OP CHILDREN IN NAZARLTH 



do it this week. The way is mountainous in the extreme. To those who went up 
to the ' Tip Top House,' on Mount Washington, before the railroad was laid, I 
will say that this journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem is like seven such American 
journeys. So, all up and down, and across, and recrossing Palestine, Jesus 
walked. 

" Now we are waiting for orders to mount for Cana of Galilee. We find in 
the village at a Greek convent some of the water-pots, or specimens of the same 



156 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



kind, that were used at the famous wedding where Christ turned the contents of 
them from common water into grape juice. We were surprised at the size of 
these water-jars. I measured them, and found them eighteen inches in width from 
edge to edge, and nineteen inches in depth. What a beautiful and strange vintage 
at that wedding! Not a grape, not a wine press, yet six of these great jars 
filled with a beverage richer than Malaga, and yet so harmless that after all the 
wedding banqueters had partaken till they could drink no more, there was in all 
the festal hall not a flushed cheek, nor a glassy eye, nor a dizzy head, nor a 





jF! 



RUSSIAN PILGRIMS BATHING IN THE JORDAN 



disturbed stomach. But let not the modern guzzler pat himself approvingly as 
though he were, in drinking wine, doing only what the Lord helped the people of 
Cana to do. There is not one drop of that kind of wine in any of the flasks, 
decanters, or rum jugs of the present day. Christ, by a glorious miracle, turned 
water into wine, but the devil, by infernal miracle, turns wine into suicide, and 
poverty, and assassination, and orphanage, and w 7 oe, and death. Take your choice 
of miracles. 



IN THE HOLY LAND 157 

" The most fearful climb in Palestine is the ascent of the Mount of Beati- 
tudes. The horses fairly groan with the effort of transporting one up the first 
mountain, which is only a stepping-stone to the Mountain of Blesseds. Then 
we ride across fields where every step seems a trap for the feet of the horses. 
They stumble with their fore feet, and knuckle with their back feet, until it is 
only by a stout grip of mane or saddle we stay on. But oh, what a sweep of 
vision, now that we have reached the top ! It is the Valley of the Hudson, 
from Catskill Mountain House. I am entranced. Hail, hills of Galilee. Hail, 
Take Gennesareth ! 

" As we were climbing to the top of the Mount of Beatitudes, I could not 
help remarking to the one who rode next to me, ' It is appropriate that the ascent 
to the Mount of the Saviour's Blesseds should be difficult, for some of the attain- 
ments commended there by our Tord are heights most difficult to reach. For 
instance : Who really loves his enemies ? We may not wish them harm, indeed, 
you may wish them well. But there are not many who have a real affection for 
those who maltreat them. I never, personally, knew of but one person who, with- 
out doubt, gained the glorious height. That was David T. Talmage, my father. 
More like Christ was he than any person I ever knew, unless it were my mother. 
Dead more than a quarter of a century, yet their example is to me pillar of cloud 
by day and pillar of fire by night. But such characters are not frequent. Lov- 
ing your enemies is a grace not easily attained. Was I not right in saying to 
our dragoman, ' David, the Mount of Beatitudes is hard to climb? ' 

A SAD PROCESSION 

" We saw to-day a procession, mostly dressed in black, approaching. Soon 
we heard the wailing of many women. It was a sad, moaning outcry. They fol- 
lowed an ornamented box which contained the dead body of a girl. At the front 
i)f the box was a pole on which was a sort of cap, with locks of the hair of the 
deceased floating from beneath it. On the same covered pole were some adorn- 
ments which I imagine had been worn by the deceased during her lifetime. The 
box was on the shoulders of four men. The procession of weeping women was 
led by one whom I supposed to be the mother of the dead child. She had in her 
hands a narrow piece of blue cloth about a yard long, which she lifted into the air, 
now by one hand and now by the other, and as if in effort to break it and no 
doubt carrying out the Oriental custom of rending in grief. I thought I could see 
her sorrow was genuine, and it was the real mother bewailing her dead, and so no 
doubt there was as much heartbreak in the lamentation as there is when an Ameri- 
can mother bemoans her childlessness. There may also have been other relatives 
in the throng who were agonized. But the rest of the crowd seemed to dramatize 
bereavement, and careful inspection discovered the tearless eyes, and that they 
were enacting something that seemed called for by the proprieties of the occa- 
sion. The corpse was carried into a sacred enclosure, and two or three men went 



158 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




PROCESSION OP THE M AH MAI, FROM CAIRO TO MECCA 



IN THE HOLY LAXD 



159 



through genuflexions which meant no doubt much to them but nothing to us ; 
meanwhile the women of the procession sat down at the distance of a city block 
away from the enclosure, but the men sat nearer by. Then the box, with the 
floating tresses of the departing girl was brought out, and the procession resumed 
its march to the grave, and the wild and bitter cry again ascended. 

" I followed to the gates of the cemetery and was passing in, when my friend 
called attention to the fact that we had no right to enter. Some twenty of the 
women were, by angry voice and violent gesticulation, forbidding our going in. 
They evidently discovered that we were strangers and of another nationality and 
religion, and our intrusion would be a sacrilege. So we halted, but we had seen 
for the first time the type of an Oriental burial. It was to us a deeply sad and 
solemn spectacle. Xo element 
of the ludicrous disturbed our 
minds as others have some- 
times been impressed. While 
the grief of the mother stirred 
our sympathies, the affectation 
of sorrow by others was only 
what we have witnessed in civ- 
ilized lands, where sometimes a 
long row of carriages and a 
profusion of crape and costly 
silver handles to a casket mean 
nothing except that the funeral 
must be fashionable, although 
perhaps the most of the people 
in the procession are glad that 
the old man is at last dead, for 
now there will be a distribution 
of his property. 

"After having had our break- 
fast-table fish from Galilee, like 
that which Christ gave broiled 
to his disciples after their night of 
overcoat on the snow-white pebbles 




ON CALVARY S MOUNT 



: poor luck ' in fishing, I spread my 
of the lake and began to read the 
Poems of the Evangelists, descriptive of what took place on or near these 
waters, more sacred than any that ever gleamed in any other bowl, whether 
of divine or human sculpturing. A sailboat glides near, but as there is no 
wind, the sails are down and the oars propel the prow through the shattering 
crystal. Again Christ walks this lake, and he comes to me in a feeling of 
peace which he only can breathe into the soul. We can understand now how 
high winds can lift this lake. The canons, as they are called in Colorado, or 
the wadys, as they are called in Palestine, are invitatior g to hurricanes. Last 




A FOUNTAIN AT CAN A OF GALILEE 



IN THE HOLY LAND 161 

night, from a calm that moved not a tassel of our tent, in one minute there 
rushed by a wind that tested every rope and pole of our encampment to the 
utmost, and blew away from the front of our tent not only the coals of our bon- 
fires, but the ashes and the wood, and caused a fright of some of our group 
which called the dragoman, who prophesied that in twenty minutes it would be 
over, and sure enough in about that time there was not enough atmospheric 
motion to flutter a feather. 

" We are camped near the village of Tiberias. Many of the ' Lives of 
Christ ' say that Christ was never here. The Bible does not say he ever visited 
Tiberias, but it says : ' Jesus went about all the cities and villages,' and I have 
no doubt he visited this city, which was second to none in importance. Some 
authors say Christ did not come to Tiberias, because it was populated by a very 
degraded people. This was the very reason that would have brought him 
here; the worse the disease, the more need of a doctor. 

A STORM ON THE LAKE 

" On Monday morning I am in a boat on Lake Galilee, one sail up and four 
oars plying. It has been raining in the night and a fog hangs over the waters, 
but the fine lace veil of the morning mist is lifted and the Gadarene shore on 
one side and the Tiberias Hills on the other, are coming to revelation and look 
like the banks of the Hudson in late September, after the frosts have put their 
diligent and skilful pencil upon the foliage. Yes, on the right hand side are 
the very hills down which the swine ran when possessed of the devil. 

" But the most of the memories of this sheet of water and its surroundings 
are elevating. "What a sedative to Christ must have been a look at this lake 
after the hard religious work of the day. The air off the waters cooled his 
hot brow. Up and^ down these banks our Lord walked, and the best society 
he ever had was when he was alone with the mountains and the sea. But 
suddenly, this (Monday) morning, the winds rise, and our boat begins to rock. 
Never before in any waters have I seen such a change in five minutes. The 
oarsmen toil hard at their places. Fortunately we are near our landing at 
Capernaum. If the winds and the waves increase for the next half hour as 
they have in the last ten minutes, and we were still out, our craft would be 
unmanageable, and we would have to cry as did the disciples on the same lake, 
' Lord, save, or we perish.' While our boat is thumping on the rocks, some 
of our oarsmen plunge waist deep in the water, and carry ashore those of our 
party who do not wish to wade. All is well. Peace, be still ! 

THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION 

" We are ending our Palestine journey. We will, in a few hours, pass into 
Syria and to Damascus, and then to Beyrout, and so homeward. Two more 
nights in tent. We have had all the conveniences and comforts of the most 
ii 



1 62 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WOR 



improved modern travel. Every evening in the long march we have found fires 
builded, tents spread and warm food ready, for the reason that most of our 
caravan starts an hour and a half earlier in the morning. We detain only two 
mules for carrying so much of our baggage as we might incidentally need, and 
a tent for a noonday luncheon, 

" We are encamped now by Lake Merom, in proximity to which Joshua 
an army experiences when the Lord comes down in all his might against them. 




TOWER OF DAVID AND CITY WALL 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



163 




BEDOUIN OE LAKE GAULEE 



This is the place where the horses were hamstrung. Mount Hermon is in sight, 

fought his last great battle, scattering the 
allied kings in such utter rout as only on its 
brow a crystal coronet of ice and snow, for 
it is winter now. But in April these snows 
will melt and the dew will take its place. 
This Hermon was the Mount of Transfig- 
uration then, and to-day, by the bright 
clouds and a rainbow hovering, it is again, 
in its beauty and glory and almost super- 
natural radiance, a Mount of Transfigura- 
tion. 

AN ORIENTAL BLIZZARD 

" This is our last day in Palestine. 
Farewell to its mountains, its lakes, its 
valleys. I feel myself worn with the emo- 
tions of this journey in the Holy Land. 
One cannot live over the exciting scenes of 
eighteen hundred or four thousand years 
without feeling the result in every nerve of 
his body. Beside that, it is a very arduous 

journey. Six and seven hours of horseback in a 

country which is one great rock, split and shattered 

and ground into fragments, some of them as large as 

a mountain and some of them as small as the sand 

of the sea. 

In a later part of his Palestine journey history 

Dr. Talmage told a rare experience which he and 

his party had in their travels. It was nothing less 

than an Oriental blizzard. This is the graphic man- 
ner in which he described it ; " Not quite as danger- 
ous or perilous as those that occur in our own North- 
west, but still sufficiently exciting." 

" This afternoon we are caught in a tempest that 

drenches the mountain. One of the horses falls and 

we halt amid blinding rain. It is freezing cold. 

Fingers and feet like ice. Two hours and three- 

ouarters before encampment. We ride on in silence, 

longing for the terminus of to-day's pilgrimage. It 

is, through the aAvful inclemency of the weather, the 

onlv dangerous dav of the journey. Slip, and slide, 

and stumble, and climb, and descend, we must ; some- 




BEDOUIN OF THE DESERT 



[64 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 




IN THE HOLY LAND 



165 



times on the horse, and sometimes off, until at last we halt at a hovel of the 
village, and instead of entering camp for the night, are glad to find this retreat 
from the storm. It is a house of one story, built out of mud. A feeble fire in 
mid-floor, but no chimney. It is the best house in the village. Arabs, old and 
young, stand round in wonder- 
ment as to why we come. There 
is no window in the room where 
I write, but two little openings, 
one over the door and the other 
in the wall, through which latter 
outlook I occasionally find an 
Arab face thrust to see how I am 
progressing. But the door is open 
and so I have light. 

" We have passed from Pales- 
tine to Syria, and are spending the 
last night out before reaching 
Damascus. To-mOrrow we shall 
have a forced march and do two 
days in one, and by having car- 
riages sent some twenty miles out 
to meet us, we shall be able to 
leave stirrup and saddle, and by 
accelerated mode reach Damascus 
at six or seven o'clock in the even- 
ing. Let only those in robust 
health attempt to take the length 
of Palestine on horseback. I do 
not think that it is because of the 
unhealthiness of the climate in the 
Holy Land that so many have 
sickness and died while here, or 
afterward, but because of the 
fatigues. The number of miles 
gives no indication of the exhaus- 
tions of the way. A hundred and 
fifty miles in Palestine and Syria 
on horseback demand as much 
physical strength as four hundred miles on horseback in regions of easy travel. 
I am to-night in good health, notwithstanding the terrible journey; and seated 
by a fire, the smoke of which, finding no appropriate place of escape, takes lodg- 
ment in my nostrils and eyes. For the first time in my life I realize that chimneys 
are a luxury but not a necessity. 




DRAGOMAN DAVID JAMAL, 



1 66 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" During the night the storm ceased and next morning we rose at five o'clock 
and at six were feeling for the stirrups of our saddles. We are on the road to 
Damascus. 

" At six o'clock p. M. we arrive at Damascus. The long horseback ride 
through Palestine is ended. A carriage met us twenty miles out and brought us 
to the city. The impressions one receives as he rides along the walled gardens 
of the place are different from those produced by any other city. To-morrow we 
will explore and see for ourselves the place about which we have heard and read 
so much, the oldest city under the sun. 

" Our first night passed in Damascus, we were up early and abroad, and after 
some days of tarrying here, feel that we have seen Damascus, the ' street called 
Straight,' along which good Ananias went to meet Saul, the site of the palace 
of Naaman, the leper, the river Abana, as the other day we saw Pharpar, and 
have from the northwest of the city gazed upon this ancient metropolis that has 
had so much to do with the history of the world. The bazaars of this place 
could entertain us for weeks and months, but all these styles of articles have 
become a part of American bric-a-brac, or gone into the furniture and upholstery 
of the American parlor. Yet the people are as they have always been. Xo 
change in their headwear, or sashes, or the baggy and profuse coverings of their 
limbs. 

" No one can imagine what Damascus is. Unlike all others in architecture, 
in merchandise, in general and minute appearance, it is worth while to cross 
the Atlantic and Europe to see it. Though it has been a place of battle and 
massacre and of ancient affluence and splendor, as well as of present prosperity, 
to the Christian its chief attraction arises from the fact that here the scales fell 
from Paul's eyes, and that chief of apostles here began that mission which will 
not end until heaven is peopled with ransomed spirits. We took diligence from 
Damascus to Beyrout, a fourteen hours' journey, rain- washed, crowded and 
uncomfortable. 

CHRISTMAS IN BEYROUT 

" Christmas we spent in Beyrout, and I preached in the Scotch Presbyterian 
chapel of that city. The majority of the audience were Syrians, but they all 
understood English, and a more attentive people I never addressed. The music 
was superb, solos, anthems and congregational singing. I will never forget the 
kindness of Dr. Bliss, the President of the college and the illustrious educator; 
nor Dr. Jessup, the renowned missionary, and moderator in 1883 of the General 
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and a mighty agent 
for the transference of the best of Christian literature into Arabic ; nor Dr. Post, 
the surgeon, the botanist, the Christian philosopher and prince of Christian 
workers. W r e dined at the hospitable home of Dr. Jessup and became acquainted 
with his lovely and accomplished family. It was an American Christmas dinner. 
At four o'clock we went on the steamer Minerva bound for Constantinople. 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



167 



, 




Fountain of the: aposti^S 



168 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" The next morning we found ourselves oft' the island of Cyprus. Soon 
we were approaching Patmos, the island of vision, where Domitian's prisoner 
and exile was given to see all the victories and all the woes, and all the horrors 
and all the raptures of earth and heaven going by him in a panorama, pleasing 
and blistered, and blackened and illumined. The evangel John has made that 
island the most famous of all earthly islands. 

ON THE ROCK OF PATMOS 

" Patmos is a rock sheer down, a plateau at the top reaching to the foot 
of another rock, that lifts its bare forehead to great height, then a long line of 
rock, sinking, rising, growing more defiant or subsiding into valleys in which 
there is no verdure, but only desolation and barrenness are cradled. The island 
is a place where an evangelist and other offenders against sinful authority might 
easily be starved. John's condition suggested, no doubt, much of the imagery of 
his inspired dream. As the famished are apt to dream of food, John writes 
of the deliverance of the righteous, saying, ' They shall hunger no more.' Plenty 
of water but most of it salt, the hot tongue of the evangelist thought of the 
liquid supplies of heaven, saying, ' They shall thirst no more.' 

" The waves to-day are in commotion. A high wind is blowing the billows 
of the Mediterranean against the bluffs of Patmos, and each wave has a voice 
and all the waves together make a chorus, and so they may have done in John's 
time and become symbols of the multitudinous anthems of heaven, and he says 
they are ' like the voice of many waters.' But this morning the Mediterranean 
was very smooth. The waters were crystal and the sunlight seemed to set them 
on fire. We visited also the ancient fort. I felt quite at home when I found 
many of my sermons on the table of the consul. 

44 Are the places that I see in Palestine and Syria and the Mediterranean 
isles the genuine places of Christly, patriarchal and apostolic association? Many 
of them are not, and many of them are. We have no sympathy with the 
bedwarfing of tradition. There are traditions contradicted by their absurdity, but 
if for several generations a sensible tradition goes on in regard to events con- 
nected with certain places, I am certain of the localities as though pen and doc- 
ument had fixed them. Indeed, sometimes tradition is more to be depended on 
than written communication. A writer may, for bad purposes, misrepresent? 
misconstrue, misstate, but reasonable traditions concerning places connected 
with great events are apt to be true. 

"CHRISTIAN INFIDELS" 

" I have no more doubt concerning the place on which Christ was crucified, 
or in which Christ was buried, than I have about the fact that our Lord was 
slain and entombed. But suppose traditions contradict each other? Then try 
them, test them, compare them as you do documents. It is no more difficult 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



169 




EASTER DAY CROWDS AT THE HOLY SEPULCHRE 



170 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



to separate tradition, true and false, than apocryphal books from inspired books. 
Do not use the word tradition as a synonym for delusion. There is a surplus of 
Christian infidels traveling the Holy Land who are from scalp to heel surcharged 
with unbeliefs. A tradition may be as much divinely inspired as a book. The 
scenery of Palestine is interjoined, intertwisted and interlocked with the Scrip- 
tural occurrences. The learned Ritter, who has never been charged with any 
weakness of incredulity, writes: ' No one can trace without joy and wonder the 
verification which geography pays to the history of the Holy Land.' 



mi 1 



Ml : 






HMS& 






RACHEL S TOMB 



" In this, my visit to Palestine, I find the landscape a commentary. The 
rivers, the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, the rocks, the trees, the costumes 
of the Holy Land, agree with Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John. The 
geography and topography are the background of the Gospel pictures. They 
carry a different part of the same song. Admit Palestine and you admit the 
New Testament. A distinguished man, years ago, came here and returned and 
wrote : ' I went to Palestine an infidel, and came home a Christian.' My testi- 
mony will be, that I came to Palestine a firm believer in the Bible, and return 
a thousandfold more confirmed in the divinity of the Holy Scriptures. 

" What I saw of the Christly and apostolic regions on this journey to the 
Orient leads me to say that it was an open-air religion that Jesus founded. 



IN THE HOLY LAND 171 

Indeed, the religion of the Old Testament and New was an out-of-door inaugu- 
ration. Foreseeing that the whole tendency of the human race would be toward 
a religion of Tabernacles, and Temples, and Synagogues, and Churches, the two 
greatest things ever written, namely, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon 
on the Mount, were delivered in the open air. No depreciation of consecrated 
edifices, but all places consecrated where a good word is spoken or a merciful 
deed done. 

''What were Christ's pulpits? Deck of ship, pebbly beach of sea, black 
basalt of volcanic region, mouth of cavern, where mad man was undeviled ; crys- 
tallized wave, strong enough to uphold the storm-tamer ; split sarcophagus, where 
death had been undone ; the wilderness, where a boy became the commissary or 
provider for a whole army of improvidents. You see the world needed a portable 
religion, one that the business man could take along the street, the farmer to the 
field, and the mechanic to the house-scaffolding, and the soldier in the long march 
and the sailor in the ratlines ; a religion for the sheaf-binding and the corn- 
husking, for the plough, for the adze, for the pick-axe, for the hammer. What 
a rebuke to the man who worships in the church and cheats in the store, serving 
God one day of the week and the devil six ! 

A GRANDER BIBLE 

" Indeed, I have found a new Bible. I found it in the Holy Land and the 
Grecian Archipelago. A new Book of Genesis, since I saw where Abraham 
and Lot separated, and Joseph was buried. A new Book of Exodus, since I saw 
where the Israelites crossed the desert. A new Book of Revelation, since I read 
the Divine message to Smyrna at Smyrna, and to Ephesus at Ephesus. A new 
Book of John, since I saw Jacob's Well and Sychar and Samaria. A new Book 
of Luke, since I read its twenty-third chapter on the bluff of Golgotha, at the 
place where there is room for but three crosses. The Bible can never be to me 
what it was. It is fresher, truer, lovelier, grander, mightier ! " 

"T. DEWiTT Talmage/' 



DR.. TALMAGE'S WELCOME HOME 

A wonderful scene was presented in the armory of the Thirteenth Regiment 
in Brooklyn, when Dr. Talmage made his first public appearance after his tour 
in the Holy Land. The spacious building was crowded in every part, also the 
balconies, and far up above the festooned decorations heads could be seen bending 
over. It is probable that over 10,000 persons were present in all, and thousands 
went away unable to gain entrance. A platform had been erected at the east 
end of the hall, back of which, in gas jets, the words were spelled out, " Welcome 
Home." Beneath this illuminated welcome, Dr. Talmage sat beaming on his 
many friends, and near him Dr. Louis Klopsch, the companion of his travels. 






.. 




TYPES OF 1 PALESTINE PEASANTRY 



IN THE HOLY LAND 



173 



The Mayor of Brooklyn presided, and among the distinguished guests who took 
part in the proceedings were the venerable Gen. W. T. Sherman, Gen. A. C. 
Barnes, Col. Austen, Postmaster Hendrix, and others. 

Sixty children of the Tabernacle Sunday school preceded Dr. Talmage to 
the platform, singing, " Home again from a foreign shore," and strewing 
flowers in his path. When he rose to respond to the addresses of welcome, such 
a cheer went up from the thousands of throats as is seldom heard in any gathering. 
Dr. Talmage spoke toward the close of the meeting. 




DR. TAI^JAGE AT SESOSTRIS STATUE 




DR. TALMAGE ON PATRIOTISM 

HIS MEMORABLE ADDRESS AT ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, ON DECORATION DAY, IN 1873- 
A SPLENDID TRIBUTE TO THE FALLEN HEROES OE THE CIVIL WAR 



N the whole literature of patriotism there are only a few utterances that 
contain the germs of immortality. One of the very few is the magni- 
ficent address delivered by Dr. Talmage on A [ay 30, 1873, at the dedica- 
tion of the Memorial Temple, Arlington Heights. The air was charged 
with the aroma of flowers. The rostrum, erected to seat five thousand 
persons, was filled to its utmost capacity, and the address was listened 
to attentively by the multitude. The intense pathos of some of the passages 
brought tears to hundreds of eyes. Dr. Talmage spoke as follows: 

THE NATION'S MARTYRS 

" Friends of those who died for their country : I give you my right hand in 
svmpathy, condolence and congratulation. Assembled for the first time in the 
Memorial Building, let us, before any other word be uttered, dedicate it to the 
holy purpose for which it has been erected. We consecrate it to the memory of 
the country's martyrs and to the God of the soldier and the sailor, the God of the 
land and the sea, the God of Gettysburg and South Mountain. Year after year 
may it stand to show that they who suffered and died for their country shall 
be held in everlasting remembrance, while the names of our enemies shall rot. 

" On Arlington Heights to-day there are three armies assembled. The one is 
a great host of sympathetic souls — your hands, and eyes, and lips all expressive 
of gratitude for what our departed brothers did for us in agony, and tears, and 
blood. If there be in all this audience a soul so base as to feel no tenderness or 
thanks, let him be gone and take his polluted foot out of this holy dust. But hail 
all the sympathizers who have come here to-day ! Hail to the living soldiery who 
have come to look upon the resting-place of their comrades ! 

THE ARMY OF THE DEAD 

" The second army on these Heights is the army of the dead — 15,000 ! Walk 
softly about the place. They have gone into tent for the night. Their heads on 
pillows of dust. Their arms stacked. Their march ended. Their battles 

175 



176 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

fought. Sleep on, great host, till the morning strike through the rifts of the tent 
and the trumpet sound the reveille of the Resurrection ! 

" The third army is the invisible host that hovers above us — the immortals 
who mingle in all grand and holy occasions, led on by the Lord of Hosts, who is 
mighty in battle. Blessed be His glorious name forever ! 

" But why should we select these graves for especial honor? It is no isolated 
or strange thing for men to die in battle. At Chalons 300,000 men fell. In 
Marius' army 290,000 men fell. Under Jenghiz Kahn, at Herat, 1. 600,000 fell. 
At Neishar 1,747,000 fell. In one campaign of Xerxes 5,000,000 men were sacri- 
ficed. Think of the 120,000 that perished in the siege of Ostend ; of 300,000 at 
Acre; of 1,100,000 dead at Jerusalem; of 1,816,000 dead at Troy, and remember 
tli at the slain in battle, according to an estimate founded upon a statement of 
Edmund Burke, have been many more times greater than the present population 
of the whole earth. When it is so common a thing to die in battle, why select 
these graves with such specialty of reverence and affection ? 

FLOWERS FOR THE HEROES 

" It is for the same reason that when a child takes a handful of flowers out 
to Mount Auburn, or Laurel Hill, or Greenwood, she puts them all on one grave 
in the family plot. You say, ' Why not scatter them all over the cemetery ? ' 
She will tell you : ' This is my father's grave.' So, my friends, Arlington is our 
family plot in the world's great cemetery. The men who lie here went forth 
from our homes. The dreadful war proclamation came out. Father came in 
from the post-office and excitedly read it, and said : ' I wonder if any of our 
boys will have to go?' That very night the sons came in from the field and 
said : ' Father, you are too old to go ; you stay at home and take care of mother, 
and we're off to-morrow morning for the war.' And then the sons went forth 
through the streets : ' Father Abraham, we're coming, three hundred thousand 
strong.' 

OFF TO THE WAR. 

"Then there were hasty farewells, and the putting up of a few things in a 
package with a daguerreotype or two. The train halted at the village depot, and 
there was a crowd around the car window, and ' three times three ' were given for 
the volunteers. Huzza ! Huzza ! The battle came, and a week after the long list 
of the dead arrived at the post-office. The father stood amid the crowd reading 
the newspaper, when he dropped as though he were dead. Both the boys were 
gone ! And now in that home there are hanging over the mantel two pictures of 
two young men in military suits who never came back, and when 'Decoration 
Day ' comes, mother does not feel well enough to go out to the cemetery, but 
she gets a few old-fashioned flowers out of the country door-yard and twists 
them around the pictures, or takes them down from the wall and holds them in 
her lap, and fondles and kisses them as only a broken-hearted mother knows how. 



DR. TALMAGE ON PATRIOTISM 177 

TWO WREATHS 

" But we come out to look after their bodies to-day, and to put two wreaths on 
that boy's mound — one for father and one for mother, and the dew to-night will 
fill them with tears. Yes, this is our family plot. There is no power in grave- 
diggers' spade to cut the bond between us. Each one of these graves is an oath 
of loyalty and patriotism. Loving them, we must love and defend the cause 
for which they fell. Look out how you talk treason in the presence of a man 
whose sons sleep under the sod at Spottsylvania Court House. Be careful what 
you say against your Government in the presence of the widow whose husband 
fell in the fearful charge on Ball's Bluff. Count the cost before you insult the 
flag in the presence of the young man whose father was starved to death at 
Salisbury. Malign your country in the presence of that old "man whose home was 
desolated by the war; the blood will come to his colorless cheek and the fire to 
his lustreless eye and strength to his palsied tongue, and you shall feel all the 
consuming power of the old man's curse. This nation, with its hand on the 
brow of its slain fathers and brothers and sons, hath solemnly sworn before 
high heaven that the institutions for which these men were martyred shall be 
defended forever. 

NO PARTISANSHIP 

" But let us bring no partisan feelings in this decoration of graves. In other 
years in some places demagogues have tried to make capital out of such gather- 
ings, but I don't believe in bartering with the bones of our country's martyrs. 
They have done enough work. Let them sleep on until the last day wakes them. 
Let nothing be done to stir up the old feud between the North and the South. 
Surely, there has been blood enough shed, and groans enough have been uttered, 
and families enough destroyed, to satisfy the worst man on earth, and the worst 
demon in the pit, and if amid the holocaust of the dead any hand, North or 
South, shall ever be lifted to tear down a peace established at so much sacrifice, 
may that hand turn white with the snow of an incurable leprosy! Instead of 
flowers upon such a villain's grave let the whole nation come and fling a moun- 
tain of nettles and nightshade. 

" I am told that after a Southern woman had decorated the grave of a South- 
ern soldier, a Northern man wearing uniform took up the wreath and tore it to 
pieces and threw it to the winds. He may have had on the epaulettes, but he was 
not worthy the name of soldier. I would that all the wreaths that have ever been 
laid on the graves of the Northern and Southern dead might be lifted and linked 
together, each garland a link, and that with that one long, bright, pleasant chain 
of roses and lilies this whole nation might be encircled in everlasting amity and 
good feeling. This is the only kind of chain Americans will ever consent to wear, 
and woe to the government that ever tries to forge another ! 

" And now, on this 30th day of May, lift up your eyes and see in all our 
cemeteries, from San Francisco to Canada, the whole nation coming with garlands. 
12 



DR. TALMAGE ON PATRIOTISM 179 

They come from North, and South, and East, and West. The drums beat the 
grand march, and the minute guns 'are the heart throb of the nation's sympathy. 
They come with flowers in wreaths. They are suggestive of the conqueror. 
And flowers in crosses ; they tell of sorrows that were borne. Flowers white, 
significant of victory. But there are also flowers crimson and red; the seed for 
them planted at Antietam, Shiloh, and Hatcher's Run — planted in trenches cov- 
ered with the iron rake of battie, putting forth their red and fiery bloom to-day, 
suggestive of the blood spilled and the ruddy flash of musketry. The supersti- 
tious are afraid of graveyards by night, but I think the most timid child would 
not be afraid to walk to-night at twelve o'clock in any of our cemeteries, so 
fragrant are they. 

MISSING GRAVES 

" But some of the soldiers' graves will be missed to-day, notwithstanding ten 
thousand hands have been busy stripping gardens and hot-houses for this magni- 
ficent opening; so I bring three or four garlands of my own. The first I let 
down into the rivers and seas above the coral pillow of those whose bodies have 
never been found. They fell from the gunboats and fire rafts. They dropped 
from their cavalry horses crossing the Potomac. They went down in the storm 
off Cape Hatteras. They were shot down from the ship's rigging going into 
New Orleans. They never came home. They were buried without shroud, or 
funeral, or psalm, the hoarse thunders of the battle their only litany. There is 
nothing more delicate than the sarcophagus of coral in which they rest, or more 
beautiful than the seaweed that lies above their lowly pillow. But that is not 
enough. They shall not be missed to-day. With loving hands we let down into 
the wave this garland of our affection and gratitude, commending their bodies 
to Him at whose command the sea shall give up its dead. 

STILL MORE GARLANDS 

" Another garland. The most suggestive inscription above thousands buried 
in these national cemeteries is the word ' Unknown.' Even their names have 
been lost. Unknown, although father and mother, and wife and child waited 
long for their coming. Unknown, though they gave their life for their country. 
Unknown to man, but known to God, who hath made record of the wounds and 
tears, and sacrifice. Their graves have not been forgotten to-day. The hand 
of the Government they died to save has strewn those graves. But let us go 
along by the swamps of the Chickahominy, and through the wilderness, and 
along by the western rivers and jungles, where men died and received a hasty 
burial — perhaps no burial at all ! Perhaps no burial at all ! No one to close the 
eyes. No one to hold the dying hand. No one to take the farewell message. 
Unknown ! Let us search him out. We find him to-day and cry : ' Hail, resting 
place of the patriot dead ! The garland of a nation's thanks we place upon thy 
tomb, wet with the nation's tears/ 



180 T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AND WORK 

THE GRAVES OF THE WOMEN 

" Another garland we put upon the graves of the women who died in the 
service of the sick and wounded soldiers. Let not their graves be missed to-day. 
I mean the women who did practical work among the suffering soldiery — not 
such work as the woman performed who in a hospital gave a tract on ' The sin 
of dancing ' to a man both of whose legs had been amputated, but practical, 
common sense work. What would those brave fellows have done in the last 
hour if the women had not come into the hospitals ? When the time comes for us 
to die, we want to die at home. The roof may be very humble, and the faces that 
look into ours may be very plain ; but who cares for that ? Loving hands to 
bathe the brow. Loving lips to read the promises. But those ' boys in blue ' 
were dying away from home, and what would have become of them had not 
women in the name of Christ bent over their couch in the hospitals? Men 
forged the cannon. Men fashioned the musketry. Men mounted the guns. 
Men unlimbered the batteries. ' Men lifted the wounded into ambulances ; but 
woman scraped the lint. Woman administered the cordial. Woman watched the 
dying pillow. Woman wrote the last message to the home circle. Woman wept 
at the solitary burial, attended only by herself and four men with a spade. 

THE STORY OF MARY BRADY 

" The story can never be fully told on earth of Mary Brady among the sick at 
Chickahominy ; of Anna Ross at Cooper Shop Hospital; of Mrs. Ricketts at Bull 
Run ; of Margaret Breckinridge coming to men who had for three weeks lain on 
their one side, part of the time frozen to the earth. When she turned them, all 
who had an arm left waved it and hurrahed until the air rang again ; or of Mrs. 
Hoge coming down from Chicago with blankets and pillows and sheets and 
stores until the men cried, ' Three cheers for the sanitary commission ! ' ' God 
bless the women at home ! ' and then sitting down at the pillow of the sick to 
hear the dying message and write it : ' Tell her not to fret about me, we shall meet 
in heaven. Tell her it was all right that I came. Tell her to train the two little 
boys we love so well to go to heaven with us, and tell her to bear my loss like a 
soldier's wife and a Christian.' 

GOOD MRS SHELTON 

" Or the story of good Mrs. Shelton, into whose face the convalescent sol- 
dier looked when she said : ' Are you up? ' and he replied : ' Yes. your grapes and 
cologne did the business for me.' Men did the work with shot and shell and 
howitzer and carbine. Woman her's with socks, and slippers, and bandages, and 
warm blankets, and a chapter of Scripture, and a stroke of the gentle hand across 
the hot temples, and stories of heaven, where they are never sick. Men asked of 
the suffering : ' Which side did you fight on ? ' ' To what regiment did you 
belong?' Women inquired: 'Where are you hurt?' ' W T hat nice thing can 



DR. TALMAGE ON PATRIOTISM 181 

I make for you to eat ? ' ' What makes you cry ? ' Some of these women for 
whom I have twisted the garland may be living yet. If so, they have the 
pleasure of hearing their own obituary, and will know how beautifully we will 
make the ground blossom above them when they really get under it. 

HONOR. THE LIVING HEROES 

" I bring another garland. Let it be of the richest and rarest aromatic flowers. 
Let there be in it amaranth and green branches. Let it be brighter than any 
ever placed on the brow of Roman conqueror, and we will place it not on the 
grave of the dead, but on the brows of the living soldiers and sailors — the Grand 
Army of the Republic. It is high time in this country that we stopped post- 
poning until after death the praise we owe men while they are living. We cannot 
pay you for the privations you suffered, for the arm that was shattered, or the 
eye that was put out, or the health that was lost; but we shall not forget your 
sacrifice because you have put off your uniform. I offer you everlasting thanks 
in the name of a Union restored, of a Government re-established, and a race 
redeemed from servitude, so that from the time the sun rises on the Eastern 
coast until it sets behind the Sierra Nevada, its burning eye cannot discover a 
single slave. Thank God that in all the land all are free and equal, with the 
determination by the help of God and our own right arm of always being free ! 

THE SOLDIERS' ORPHANS 

" But the brightest flowers that are put on the grave to-day will in a little 
while wither. The petals will scatter, and even the • everlasting ' will be 
dimmed, so that if the nation has nothing but flowers to bring as offerings, she 
might as well put her hand on her mouth and hide her head. We want a wreath 
of five dollar bills large enough to encircle all the Soldiers' Homes and Asylums 
in the country. Look upon these orphans to-day, ye who have hearts to pity 
and hands to help ! Lord God, who seest the orphan's midnight pillow, and who 
hath helped the widow, watched her child since their main support has been 
gone, look upon these little ones. Oh, Lord God AJmighty, who didst unsheathe 
Thy sword from the scabbard of cloud on Lookout Mountain, we cry to Thee that 
Thou wilt wipe away the tears of orphanage and widowhood. 

" It is not so much posies they want as bread. It is high time that it ceased 
to be necessary that the man who lost an arm or a leg in fighting our battles 
should have to grind hand-organs at the street corners, and that the woman 
whose husband perished in battle at the point of the sword should herself die at 
the point of the needle. Let the children of the dead soldiers and sailors be the 
pets of the nation, and in first-rate schools taught the story of Nathaniel Lyon, 
in whose last bayonet charge their fathers perished; and of Anderson, under 
whom their fathers fought until they were smothered in the casemates; and of 
Farragut, under whom their fathers stood when upon water and sky and ship 
burst the blaze of battle, - ~ - 



182 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



TELL THE CHILDREN 

" Yea, teach our children these lessons, and what Marathon was to the Greeks, 
by way of illustration, let Malvern Hills, and Shiloh, and Fort Donelson be to our 
children. W T hen we are trying to impress upon them what the redemption of the 
land cost, and we fail to recall hundreds of the brave men who perished for the 
land, let us take two names as suggestive of all the rest — both of them martyrs, 
the one perishing at the beginning and the other at the close — two names ever 
dear to American hearts — two names never to die — Ellsworth, the first, and 
Abraham Lincoln, the last. In all time to come, let this memorial be kept. 
Strew flowers on all the martyrs' graves. Strew them on the heads that ached, 
and over the hearts that bled, and over the feet that blistered in the war march. 
Oh, ye throngs of departed heroes, stoop down and breathe this perfume of 




TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN DEAD, ARLINGTON 



DR. TALiMAGE ON PATRIOTISM 



183 



a nation's thanks ; stoop down and take this kiss of a nation's love ; stoop down 
and hear the shout of a nation's redemption. 

AN INVOCATION TO PEACE 

" Speed on the day when war itself shall be buried — the grim old breaker of 
hearts. Carry him out on an old rusty shield. Let down his miserable carcass in 
the most desolate spot of all the earth. Bury his sword with him. Heap on him 
stones and broken chariot wheels. Let widows and orphans clap their hands and 
the winds howl for this requiem : ' This is the second death.' 

' Thus shall one nation's song ascend, 
To Thee, our Ruler, Father, Friend, 
While Heaven's high arch resounds again, 
With peace on earth, good- will to men.' 

" And now, in my higher capacity as a minister of the Most High God, I 
pronounce the Christian blessing upon citizens and soldiers, upon our beloved 
Chief Magistrate and all his associates, and all this august assemblage. 

" May God fit us for the day when these dead shall rise, and the Archangel, 
with one foot on the sea and the other on the land, shall swear by Him that 
liveth forever and ever that time shall be no longer ! " 





HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 

PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION — ANARCHY — VICTORIA'S REIGN — ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
— GAMBLING — THE LIQUOR QUESTION — HIGH LICENSE — IMPURE LITERATURE 
— LABOR AND CAPITAL AND THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION OP THE PROBLEM 



T was not to be expected that a preacher of the positive type to which 
Dr. Talmage belonged would be silent concerning the great issues of 
the day. Whenever a public question of unusual importance arose, 
he rarely failed to discuss it, frankly and unreservedly, in his pulpit 
addresses. In many instances, these deliverances, by virtue of their 
boldness and orginality, as well as by the eloquent manner of their 
presentation, produced a marked influence upon the public mind. We give 
below the opinions Dr. Talmage expressed on leading public issues at different 
periods during his career : 

THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT McKINLEY 

While the whole country was shocked by the intelligence of President 
McKinley's assassination, Dr. Talmage voiced the popular feeling in these 
words : 

" The President is dead ! AJ wave of sorrow rolls over the land. It is 
to me a personal bereavement. From the time that William McKinley, as 
President of the Young Men's Christian Association at Canton, O., intro- 
duced me to an audience until the present, nothing of importance occurred 
in his life or mine, but we exchanged telegrams. We have been very good 
friends. But he is gone. God pity his wife ! God pity us ! 

" President McKinley was all his life the enemy of sin, the enemy of 
sectionalism, the enemy of everything small-hearted, impure and debasing, 
and he made many a crushing blow against these moral and political Philis- 
tines, but in his death he made mightier conquest. His one week of dying 
had made more illustrious record than the fifty-seven years' living. ' So the 
dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.' 

" Our President's death, more than his life, or any life, eulogizes the Chris- 
tian religion. We all talk about the hope of the Christian, and the courage of 
the Christian, and the patience of the Christian. Put all the sermons on these 
184 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 185 

subjects for the last ten years together, and they would not make such an 
impression as the magnificent demeanor of the dying chief magistrate. Going 
into unconsciousness under the power of anaesthetics, he is hearing whispers 
of ' Thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory.' He utters words 
pitying his assassin. In his last moments he chanted ' Nearer, my God, to 
Thee, nearer to Thee.' He was no more afraid to die than you are to go home. 
Without one word of complaint he endures the physical anguish. All he ever 
did in confirmation of religion in days of health was nothing compared to what 
he did for it in this last crisis. 

" Many years ago he arose in a religious meeting and asked for prayers. 
Soon after he knelt at the church altar. William McKinley had no new relig- 
ion to experiment with in his last hours. It was the same Gospel into the 
faith of which he was baptized in early manhood. The religion has stood 
the test through all the bufferings and persecutions, through the hard work 
of life, and did not forsake him in the tremendous close. 

" There have been thousands of death-beds as calm and beautiful as this, 
but they were not so conspicuous. This electrifies Christendom. This 
encourages all the pain-struck in hospitals and scattered all up and down the 
world to suffer patiently. The consumptive, the cancered, the palsied, the 
fevered, and the dying of all nations lift their heads from their hot pillows, 
and bless this heroic, this triumphant, this illustrious sufferer. The religion 
that upheld him under the surgeon's knife, and amid the appalling days and 
nights of suffering, is a good religion to have. Show us in all the ages among 
the enemies of Christianity a death-bed that will compare with this radiant 
sunset. 

" These last scenes must impress the world, as no preachment ever did, 
that when our time comes to go, the most energetic and skilful physicians 
cannot hinder the event. Was there ever so much done to save a man's life as 
the life of President McKinley? But the doctors could not keep him. A lov- 
ing and brave wife could not keep him. The anxieties of a nation could not 
keep him. His great spirit pushes them all back from the gates of life, and 
soars away into the infinities." 

CONCERNING ANARCHY 

" This tragedy (the shooting of President McKinley), as nothing else, 
demonstrates what a hideous' thing is Nihilism or Anarchy. That assassin 
shouted: 'I am an Anarchist.' Anarchism owns nothing but a knife for 
universal cutthroatery, and nitroglycerine bomb for universal explosion. He 
believes in no God, no government, no heaven, no hell except what he can 
make on earth. He slew the Czar of Russia, and keeps the Emperor of Ger- 
many in a tremble, destroyed the King of Italy, shot at Edward the Prince, 
now Edward the King, and would put to death every King and President on 
earth ; and if he had the power, would climb up until he could drive the God 



1 86 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



of Heaven from his throne and take it himself, the universal butcher. In 
France it is called Communism. In Russia it is called Nihilism. It means 
complete and eternal smash-up, and it would drive a dagger through your 
heart, and put a torch to your dwelling, and turn over the whole land to theft, 
lust, rapine and murder. ' Where does the monster live? In all the cities of 
this land. It proposes to tear to pieces the ballot-box, the legislative hall, the 
Congressional Assembly. It would take this land and divide it up, or rather 
divide it down. It would give as much to the idler as to the worker, to the 
bad as to the good. 

" Anarchism ! This panther, having prowled across other lands, has set 
its paw on our soil. It was Anarchism that burned the railroad property at 
Pittsburg during the great riots ; it was Anarchism that slew black people 
in our Northern cities during the Civil War ; it is Anarchism that glares out of 
the windows of the drunkeries upon sober people as they go by. Ah ! its 
power has never yet been tested. I pray God its power may never be fully 
tested. It would, if it had the power, leave every church, chapel, cathedral, 




GREAT GOSPET MEETINGS AT ACADEMY OF MUSIC, NEW YORK 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 187 

schoolhouse and college in ashes. It is the worst enemy of the laboring 
classes in our country. In this land riot and bloodshed never gained any 
wages for the people, or gathered up any prosperity. In this land the best 
weapon is not the club, not the shillalah, not firearms, but the ballot. 

" But Anarchism is doomed. Russia and Germany and Italy and France 
and England will join hands with the United States in memory of Abraham 
Lincoln and James A. Garfield and William McKinley to put down this villainy 
of the centuries." 

THE GLORIES OF VICTORIA'S REIGN 

" An empire on which the sun never sets mourns its beloved and revered 
sovereign, Victoria. All the nations of the earth rise up and call her memory 
blessed. No constitutional ruler in history ever held the affections of her own 
subjects, and admiration of other great empires, as did the late Queen of Great 
Britain and Empress of India. No other single reign in the history of the 
British monarchy has been so long, so pure, so illustrious, or marked by such 
marvelous progress. The empire over which she ruled has, without interrup- 
tion, progressed steadily in wealth and power, while its political and moral 
development, continuing through two full generations of her reign, marks her 
as the greatest of all the sovereigns of Europe. The glorious achievements 
of her long rule, and solidifying government of the British Empire, are due 
to the pure personal character, exalted piety, and deep devotion to the inter- 
ests of all her subjects. 

" No other sovereign ever held the loyalty and affection of all their peoples 
like Victoria. Future historians will portray the vast measurement of her 
influence, and the lasting obligations which the world owes to this departed 
monarch. Ten Prime Ministers, some of them the most brilliant intellects 
the world has ever known, served her, and by wise counsels, great caution, 
and firm adherence to the spirit and letter of the Constitution, she gained 
such an exact knowledge of all transpiring under her sceptre as to make her 
a tower of strength to the nation. Besides, her far-reaching influence by ties 
of consanguinity with the ruling families of Germany and Russia cannot be 
estimated fully, an influence always benign, and more than once contributing 
to the maintenance of European peace. It was due to the Queen's view of 
her constitutional position, and her able executive tact, that the monarchical 
theory became fitted to the fact of republicanism without detracting dignity 
on one side, or self-government on the other, and the harmonious relations 
have been such that the creation of parties hostile to the throne were never 
dreamed of in the empire. 

" The reign of Victoria will ever be remembered for its unequalled enrich- 
ment of literature and art, and its most signal triumphs of science and industry. 
The spread of education, the extension of civil and religious liberty, and gen- 



188 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

eral amelioration of social conditions by which it has been distinguished, all 
unite to mark off *■ the Victorian Era ' as one of the most memorable epochs 
in the history of the world. There is no more clear and unimpeachable testi- 
mony to God's word, that ' righteousness exalted a nation,' than this, that a 
sovereign can rule a world-wide empire, yet maintain so pure a life, and 
personal consecration, and devotion to high ideals, and by her influence wield 
a potent power for the moral development of her realm. \\ nat can be said 
of no other potentate of earth may be truly said of Victoria : None ever suf- 
fered from her indiscretions, nor did she ever need to shield herself from 
severe censures by ' the divinity that doth hedge ' a monarch, by reason of 
intrigues, ambitions, and unworthy aims." 

THE REMEMBRANCE OF LINCOLN 

"The first time we saw him, we followed into his room a committee who 
had come to Washington to tell the President how to conduct the war. We 
do not know who the committee was. The President was the saddest looking 
man I ever saw. He had a far-away look. He evidently, while standing under 
the fire of an address which was being made to him, saw the battle-fields and 
hospitals and conflagrations and national bereavement. One of his great trials 
was that of being subjected to advice by people of all sorts who had no qual- 
ification for giving advice. When one of our party asked for his autograph, he 
cheerfully gave it, asking, ' Is this all I can do for you ? ' At that time he 
was the most abused man in America. To-day he is the most admired man 
in all our country's history, with the exception of Washington. My friend, 
the late Henry W. Grady, then the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and a 
typical Southerner, startled the North with his appreciation of Abraham Lin- 
coln. It was at a New England dinner at Delmonico's, New York, ten or 
fifteen years ago. I had in my remarks spoken of the typical American, and 
that he would appear fifty or seventy-five years from then, and that he would 
be a compound of many nationalities, that he would have all the best of their 
characteristics. Mr. Grady following, said : ' Mr. Talmage has spoken of the 
great American as coming fifty or seventy-five years from now. Gentlemen, I 
have to tell you that the typical American has come. He was Abraham Lin- 
coln ! ' The effect was electric. That sentiment uttered by a Northern man 
would not have had such an effect, but it was uttered by a Southern man, 
whose father fought and died on the Southern side. The whole world now 
loves the memory of Abraham Lincoln. He Avas the impersonation of kind- 
ness. On my desk as I make this paragraph is a letter in his own handwriting. 
It was yesterday presented to us by a friend. It was written before the days 
of typewriting, and is in Mr. Lincoln's own penmanship. The Methodist Con- 
ference assembled in Baltimore had passed a resolution of encouragement and 
sent it to Mr. Lincoln, and this is his reply : 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 189 

: ' Gent^m^n : — In response to your address, allow me to attest the accu- 
racy of its historical statements , indorse the sentiment it expresses , and thank 
you in the nation's name for the sure promise it gives.' 

" ' Nobly sustained as the Government has been by all the churches, I 
would utter nothing which might in the least appear invidious against any. 
Yet without this it may fairly be said that the Methodist Episcopal Church, 
not less devoted than the rest, is, by its greater numbers, the most important 
of all. It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers 
to the field, more nurses to the hospital, and more prayers to heaven than any. 
God bless the Methodist Church — bless all the churches, and blessed be God, 
who, in this our great trial, giveth us the churches.' 

" ' May 18, 1864. A. Lincoln.' 

" General W. T. Sherman showed me, many years ago, in his home at 
St. Louis, a picture of a steamboat cabin in which President Lincoln, General 
Grant, and himself sat during the darkest time of the Civil War. The picture 
was nothing as a work of art, but General Sherman kept it to bring to mind 
what was said in that interview. He told me that President Lincoln exclaimed 
in a great outburst of grief : ' I cannot stand it any longer, this bloodshed ; 
how can we stop this war?' What a suggestive picture it was when one had 
explained to him what occurred in that steamboat cabin. Assassination always 
kills the wrong man, and a worse deed than the taking off of such a President 
cannot be imagined. Well may thel nation celebrate the anniversary of the 
birthday of the most renowned man of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 
,who once said of himself : ' Of course, when I came of age I did not know 
much ; still, somehow I could read, write and cipher to the rule of three, but 
that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have 
upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the 
pressure of necessity.' Henry W. Grady was right when he corrected me at 
the Delmonico dinner, and said : ' The typical American has come, and he 
was Abraham Lincoln ! ' " 

EASY DIVORCE 

" I want you to notice that frequency of divorce always goes along with 
the dissoluteness of society. Rome for five hundred years had not one case ot 
divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue. Then the reign of vice 
began, and divorce became epidemic. If you want to know how rapidly the 
empire went down, ask Gibbon. Do you know how the Reign of Terror was 
introduced in France? By twenty thousand cases of divorce in one year in 
Paris. 

" What we want in this country and in all lands is that divorce be made 
more and more and more difficult. Then people before they enter that relation 
will be persuaded that there will probably be no escape from it, except through 



igo T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

the door of the sepulchre. Then they will pause on the verge of that relation 
until they are fully satisfied that it is best, and that it is right, and that it is 
happiest. Then we shall have no more marriages in fun. Then men and 
women will not enter the relation witli the idea it is only a trial trip, and if 
they do not like it they can get out at the first landing. Then this whole ques- 
tion will be taken out of the frivolous into the tremendous, and there will be 
no more joking about the blossoms in a bride's hair than about the cypress on 
a cofTm." 

MARRIAGE A SPECULATION 

Again in the same discourse he denounces the growing tendency in some 
circles to treat marriage as a financial speculation. He said: 

" There are men who go into the relation just as they go into Wall Street 
to purchase shares. The female to be invited into the partnership of wedlock 
is utterly unattractive, and in disposition a suppressed Vesuvius. Everybody 
knows it, but this masculine candidate for matrimonial orders, through the com- 
mercial agency or through the county records, finds out how much estate is to 
be inherited, and he calculates it. He thinks out how long it will be before the 
old man will die, and whether he can stand the refractory temper until he does die, 
and then he enters the relation ; for he says : * If I cannot stand it, then through 
the divorce law I will back out.' That process is going on all the time, and 
men enter the relation without any moral principle, without any affection, and 
it is as much a matter of stock speculation as anything that was transacted yes- 
terday in Union Pacific, Wabash, and Delaware and Lackawana. Now, suppose 
a man understood, as he ought to understand, that if he goes into that relation 
there is no possibility of his getting out, or no probability, he would be more 
slow to put his neck in the yoke. He should say to himself: 'Rather than a 
Caribbean whirlwind with a whole fleet of shipping in its arms, give me a zephyr 
off fields of sunshine and gardens of peace.' ' : 

HIS VIEWS ON GAMBLING 

Dr. Talmage spoke with equal fidelity against gambling. This is his defini- 
tion of the popular vice : 

" Gambling is the risking of something more or less valuable in the hope of 
winning more than you hazard. The instruments of gaming may differ, but 
the principle is the same. The shuffling and dealing of cards, however full of 
temptation, is not gambling, unless stakes are put up : while, on the other hand, 
gambling may be carried on without cards, or dice, or billiards or a ten-pin 
alley. The man who bets on horses, on elections, on battles, the man who deals 
in ' fancy ' stocks, or conducts a business which hazards capital, or goes into 
transactions without foundation but dependent upon what men call ' luck.' is a 
gambler. Whatever you expect to get from your neighbor without offering an 
equivalent in money, or time, or skill, is either the product of theft or gaming. 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 



191 



Lottery tickets and lottery policies come into the same category. Fairs for the 
founding of hospitals, schools and churches, conducted on the raffling system, 
come under the same denomination. Do not, therefore, associate gambling nec- 
essarily with any instrument, or game or time or place, or think the principle 
depends upon whether you play for a glass of wine or one hundred shares of 
railroad stock. Whether you patronize ' auction pools,' ' French mutuels,' or 
' book-making,' whether you employ faro or billiards, roulette and keno, cards 
or bagatelle, the very idea of the thing is dishonest; for it professes to bestow 
upon you a good for which you give no equivalent." 

He gives a remarkable word-painting of the gambler. " Shall I sketch," 
he says, " the history of the gambler ? Lured by bad company, he finds his way 
into a place where honest men ought never to go. He sits down to his first 
game, but only for pastime, and the desire of being thought sociable. The 
players deal out the cards. They unconsciously play into Satan's hands, who 
takes all the tricks and both the players' souls for trumps — he being a sharper 
at any game. A slight stake is put up, just to add interest to the play. Game 
after game is played. Larger stakes and still larger. They begin to move 







iM** 1 




WSf 




BROADMOOR CASINO AND CHKYENN£ MOUNTAIN., COLORADO SPRINGS 



192 T. DE WITT TALMAGE HIS LIFE AND WORK 

nervously on their chairs. Their brows lower, and eyes flash, until now they 
who win and they who lose, fired alike with passion, sit with set jaws, and 
compressed lips, and clenched fists, and eyes like fireballs that seem starting 
from their sockets to see the fatal turn before it comes; if losing, pale with 
envy and tremulous with unuttered oaths cast back red-hot upon the heart — or, 
winning, with hysteric laugh — ' Ha, ha ! I have it ! ' 

" Take warning ! You are no stronger than tens of thousands who have by 
this practice been overthrown. No young man in our cities can escape being 
tempted. Beware of the first beginnings ! This road is a down-grade, and every 
instant increases the momentum. Launch not upon this treacherous sea. Splin- 
tered hulks strew the beach. Everlasting storms howl up and down, tossing 
unwary crafts into the Hell Gate. I speak of what I have seen with my own 
eyes. To a gambler's death-bed there comes no hope. He will probably die 
alone. His former associates come not nigh his dwelling. When his last hour 
comes, his miserable soul will go out of a miserable life into a miserable eternity. 
As his poor remains pass the house where he was ruined, old companions may 
look out a moment and say : ' There goes the old carcass — dead at last ;' but 
they w r ill not get up from the table. Let him down now into his grave. Plant 
no tree to cast its shade there, for the long, deep, eternal gloom that settles there 
is shadow enough. Plant no forget-me-nots or eglantines around the spot, for 
flowers were not made to grow on such a blasted heath. Visit it not in the sun- 
shine, for that would be mockery ; but in the dismal night, when no stars are 
out, and the spirits of darkness come down horsed on the wind, then visit the 
grave of the gambler." 

THE LIQUOR. QUESTION 

Dr. Talmage was always a tower of strength to the temperance cause. 
There was never any doubt where he stood on that question. In a New Year's 
Tract prepared for the Temperance League of Glasgow, Scotland, he paints 
this most remarkable and vivid picture: 

" Your land, like our own, swelters under the curse of strong drink, and 
it is time that we all take up arms against it. From the way men are everywhere 
mown down by this evil, it is evident that there must be a banded and organized 
effort against the world's sobriety. I think the original Liquor League was 
formed in the low T er world. One day the bad spirits met together and resolved 
that our human race was too happv, and a delegation of four infernals was sent 
up to earth on embassy of mischief. One spirit said: 'I will take charge of 
the vineyards ! ' Another said : ' I will look after the grain-fields ! ' Another 
said : ' I will supervise the dairv ! ' Another said : ' I will take charge of the 
music ! ' They landed in the Great Sahara Desert, clutched their skeleton fingers 
in a handshake of fidelity, kissed each other good-bye with lip of blue flame, and 
separated for their mission. 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 193 

" The first spirit entered the vineyard one bright morning, and sat down 
on the twisted root of a grapevine in sheer discouragement. He could not at 
first plan any harm for the vineyard. The clusters were so full and purple and 
luscious and pure. The air was fairly bewitched with their sweetness ; health 
seemed to breathe from every ripened bunch. But in wrath at so much loveli- 
ness, the fiend grasped a cluster in his right hand, and squeezed it with utter 
hate, and lo! his hand was red with the liquid, and began to smoke. Then the 
fiend laughed, and said, as he looked at the crimson stream dripping from his 
hand : ' That makes me think of the blood of broken hearts. I will strip the 
vineyard, and squeeze out all the clusters, and let the juices stand till they rot, 
and will call the process " fermentation." : And a great vat was made, and 
men seeing it, brought cups and pitchers and dipped them, and went oft, drink- 
ing as they went, till they dropped in long lines of death; so that when the fiend 
of the vineyards wanted to go back to his home in the pit he trod on the bodies 
of the slain all the way, going down over a causeway of the dead. 

" The fiend of the grain-field waded chin-deep through the barley and the 
rye. As he came in, he found all the grain talking about bread, and prosperous 
husbandmen, and thrifty homes. But the fiend thrust his long arms through the 
barley and rye, and pulled them up and flung them into the water, and kindled 
fires beneath by a spark from his own heart, and there was a grinding, and a 
mashing, and a stench. And men dipped their bottles into the fiery juice, and 
staggered and blasphemed and rioted and fought and murdered till the fiend of 
the grain-field was so well pleased with their behavior, he changed his residence 
from the pit to a whisky barrel; and there he sits by the doorway, at the bung- 
hole, laughing right merrily at the fact that out of so harmless a thing as barley 
and rye he has made this world a suggestion of Pandemonium. 

" The fiend of the dairy met the cows as they were coming up full-uddered 
from the pasture-field. As the maid milked, he said : ' It will not take me 
long to spoil that mess. I will add to it some brandy and sugar and nutmeg, and 
stir them up into a milk punch, and children will like it, and even temperance 
men will take it ; and if I can do no more I will make their heads ache and hand 
them gradually over to the more vigorous fiends of the satanic delegation. 5 
And then he danced a break-down on the shelf of the dairy, till all the shining- 
row of milk-pans quaked. 

" The fiend of music entered a grog-shop and found the customers few, so 
he made a circuit of the city, and gathered up all the instruments of sweet sound, 
and after the night had fallen, he marshalled a band, and trombone blew and 
cymbals clapped, and harp thrummed and drum beat, and bugle called, and 
crowds thronged in and listened, and, with wine-cup in their right hand, began 
to whirl in a dance that grew wilder and stronger and rougher, till the room 
shook and the glasses cracked, and the floor broke through and the crowd 
dropped into hell. 
13 



194 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" They had done their work so well, these fiends ol vineyard and grain- 
held and dairy and concert saloon, that, on getting back high carnival was held, 
Satan from his throne announcing the fact that there was no danger of the 
earth's redemption so long as the vineyards and orchard and grain-fields and 
music paid such large tax to the diabolic. Then all the satyrs and spirits and 
demons cried, 'Hear! Hear!" and. lifting their chalices of fire, drank 'Long 
life to rumsellers! Prosperity to the gallows! Success to the license law!'' 

THE HIGH LICENSE LAW 

Speaking of the fallacy of high license as a cure for the evils of the liquor 
traffic, he calls it, " The Monopoly of Abomination." Among other things he 
said: 

" Do you not realize, as by mathematical demonstration, that the one result 
of this high-licensed movement, and the one result of the closing of small estab- 
lishments — if that were the result — and the opening of a few large establish- 
ments, will be to make rum-selling and rum-drinking highly respectable? These 
drinkeries in Brooklyn and New York and all our cities are so disgusting that 
a man will not risk his reputation by going in them: and if a young man should 
be found coming out from one of those low establishments he would lose his 
place in the store. Xow, suppose all these small establishments are closed up 
and that then you open the palaces of inebriation down on the avenues. It is not 
the rookeries of alcoholism that do the worst work : they are only the last stop- 
ping places on the road to death. Where did that bloated, ulcerous, wheezing 
wretch that staggers out of a rum-hole get his habits started? At glittering 
restaurant or barroom of first-class hotel, where it was fashionable to go. Ah ! 
my friends, it seems to me the disposition is to stop these small establishments, 
which are only the rash on the skin of the body politic, and then to gather all 
the poison and the ichorous pus into a few great carbuncles which mean death. 
I say, give us the rash rather than the carbuncles." 

THE "FROGS IN THE LIBRARY" 

Dr. Talmage waged unceasing warfare against the plague of corrupt liter- 
ature. Speaking from the text, " And the frogs came up and covered the land 
of Egypt," he said on one occasion: 

" Now that plague of frogs has come back upon the earth. It is abroad 
to-day. It is smiting this nation. It comes in the shape of corrupt literature. 
These frogs hop into the store, the shop, the office, the banking-house, the fac- 
tory; into the home, into the cellar, into the garret, on the drawing room table, 
on the shelf of the library. While the teacher's face is turned the other way, the 
lad is reading the bad book. One of these frogs hops upon the page. While 
the young woman is reading the forbidden novelette, after retiring at night, 
reading by gas-light, one of these frogs leaps upon the page. Indeed, they 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 195 

have hopped upon the news-stands of the country, and the mails at the post- 
office shake out* in the letter trough hundreds of them. 

" I do not mean to say that all the books and newspapers in our families 
ought to be religious books and newspapers, or that every song ought to be sung 
to the tune of ' Old Hundred.' I have no sympathy with the attempt to make 
the young old. I would rather join in a crusade to keep the young young. Boy- 
hood and girlhood must not be abbreviated. But there are good books, good 
histories, good biographies, good works of fiction, good books of all styles with 
which we are to fill the minds of the young, so that there will be no more room 
for the useless and the vicious than there is room for chaff in a bushel measure 
which is already filled with Michigan wheat. Why are fifty per cent, of the 
criminals in the jails and penitentiaries of the United States to-day under twenty- 
one years of age? Many of them under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, 
under fourteen, under thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs 
prison in New York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers, be- 
witched them as soon as they got out of the cradle. Beware of all those stories 
which end wrong. Beware of all those books which make the road that ends 
in perdition seem to end in Paradise. Do not glorify the dirk and the pistol. 
Do not call the desperado brave or the libertine gallant. Teach our young peo- 
ple that if they go down into the swamps and marshes to watch the jack-o'- 
lanterns dance on the decay and rottenness they will catch malaria and death. 

: ' Oh ! ' says some one, 'I am a business man, and I have no time to 
examine what my children read. I have no time to inspect the books that come 
into my household.' If your children were threatened with typhoid fever, would 
you have time to go for the doctor ? Would you have time to watch the progress 
of the disease? Would you have time for the funeral? In the presence of my 
God I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and 
spiritual typhoid, and that unless the thing be stopped, it will be to them funeral 
of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul. Three funerals in one day. My word 
to young people is : Do not touch, do not borrow, do not buy a corrupt book or 
a corrupt picture. A book will decide a man's destiny for good or for evil. The 
book you read yesterday may have decided you for time and for eternity, or it 
may be a book that may come into your possession to-morrow." 

LABOR AND CAPITAL 

Dr. Talmage took great interest in all the problems of labor and capital and 
often spoke concerning them, always with a feeling of sympathy and a desire to 
bring about justice and peace. At a time of great strife and widespread strikes 
he gave utterance to these striking paragraphs : 

" Unless there is sudden compromise, all kinds of business will feel the shock 
of the strikes. This causes a great sadness in every intelligent mind, first, because 
a compromise might have avoided it. The workmen, April 1st, laid down the 



196 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



scale of prices at which they would work. The manufacturers flatly refused the 
proposition. Both fall back and propose to tire each other out. Perhaps the 
workmen asked too much. Perhaps the manufacturers were paying too little. 
If a few meditators had gone out from each side the difference could have been 
adjusted and the smoke above Pittsburg and Cincinnati would hav r e been as thick 
to-day as ever. The trouble will be ended by a compromise. Why not end it 
at the start with a compromise? To every intelligent man, whether capitalist or 
laborer, this state of things is deplorable. First, whole communities and large 
classes are made sour, irritable, and wrathful. Maledictions meet each other half 
way between the manufacturer's office and the home of the laborer. They wish 
each other ill. Another sadness is in the fact that the thrifty workman who 
has a little money in the savings bank or out on bond and mortgage very soon 
takes it out, or takes it up, to meet present requirements. There must be bread 
on the table, the children must have shoes, there must be more than the usual 
appearance of thrift lest there be a prospect of giving in and a necessity of ending 
the strike. A strike always means suffering. The blow comes hard both upon 




JERUSALEM £rom NEAR THE DAMASCUS GATE 



HIS VIEWS ON GREAT PUBLIC QUESTIONS 197 

capital and labor, but heaviest upon labor. In all the labor strikes since the world 
stood the workman gets the worst of it. Capitalists have money ahead and if 
they never made another dollar in all their lives they could live on a past surplus ; 
but the vast majority of toilers, though they may have laid up something for a 
rainy day, must have the rainy day too prolonged. 

" I warrant you I could pick out ten representative capitalists and ten rep- 
resentative workmen who, in one afternoon's session would settle this industrial 
grief, save millions of dollars and suffering indescribable and illimitable. I cry 
out in behalf of the imperiled financial interests of the whole country for arbi- 
tration. Capital will never help itself by fighting labor, and labor will never get 
any advantage from combating capital. They go up together or they go down 
together. Show me any year in the history of the country when capital was pros- 
perous and I will show you a year when labor was prosperous and vice versa. 
Let either interest be struck between the eyes and all interests of the land stagger 
and reel and fall. 

A WORD TO CAPITALISTS 

" But there is no doubt that, in all parts of the land, capitalists are imposing 
on labor. They own the New York Legislature and Pennsylvania Legislature, 
with a few notable exceptions. They own Congress for the most part; they 
ride over the necks of the people. We have over 5,000 millionaires in this country. 
It is a bad sign of the times when one man dies worth forty millions and another 
worth eighty millions, and our richest men are not dead yet. It wants no very 
great wisdom to see that there are people in this land who have more than their 
share. I do not wonder that sometimes men lose their equilibrium and strike, 
although it is unwise to strike, since a strike means less bread, less fuel, less 
good clothes and less honor. I expect before labor gets its rights fully estab- 
lished in this country it will have to drive back the encroachments of capital on 
the one hand, and the outrageous despotism of trades unions on the other. 

" I suppose that many of our trade unions are wielding a despotism and that 
workmen are driven and stopped and imposed upon as much by people of their 
own craft as by the capitalists. If a man has a mind to stop work, let him stop, 
but he has no right to stop me. If a man prefers to <^o to the poorhouse, let him 
go, but he has no right to compel me to go along with him. I would have this 
country so free that when a man wants to quit work, he can quit work, and 
when he wants to go ahead no trades union shall hold him back. Free hammer ! 
Free Trowel ! Free yardstick ! Free spindle ! Free furnace ! Free men ! " 

THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 

Dr. Talmage believed that the only permanent solution of the labor problem 
was through Christianity. On one occasion he said : 

" Labor is honored and rewarded in proportion as a community is Chris- 
tianized. Why is it that our smallest coin in this country is a penny, while in 



198 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

China it takes a half-dozen pieces of coin, or a dozen, to make one of our pennies 
in value, so the Chinese carry the cash, as they call it, like a string of beads 
around the neck? We never want to pay less than a penny for anything in this 
country. They must pay that which is worth only the sixth part or the twelfth 
part of a penny. Heathenism and iniquity and infidelity depress everything. The 
Gospel of Jesus Christ elevates everything. How do I account for this ? I account 
for it with the plainest philosophy. The religion of Jesus Christ is a democratic 
religion. It tells the employer that he is a brother to all the operatives in his 
establishment — made by the same God, to lie down in the same dust, and to be 
saved by the same supreme mercy. It does not make the slightest difference how 
much money you have, you cannot buy your way into the kingdom of heaven. If 
you have the grace of God in your heart, you will enter heaven. So you see it is 
a democratic religion. Saturate our populations with this Gospel, and labor will 
be respectful, labor will be rewarded, labor will be honored, capital will be 
Christian in all its behavior, and there will be higher tides of thrift setting in. 
Let me say a word to all capitalists : be your own executors. Make invest- 
ments for eternity. Do not be like some of those capitalists I know who 
walk around among their employees with a supercilious air, or drive up to 
the factory in a manner which seems to indicate they are the autocrat of the 
universe with the sun and the moon in their vest pockets, chiefly anxious 
when they go among laboring men not to be touched by the greasy or smirched 
hand and have their broadcloth injured. Be a Christian employer." 

A PLEASANT WORLD TO LIVE IN 

Dr. Talmage always took a cheerful view of life. Speaking in St. Louis 
some years ago, he said: " This is a pleasant world to live in. I have always 
been very glad that I got aboard this planet. The best color I can think of 
for the sky is blue, for the foliage is green, and for the water is a crystalline 
flash. The mountains are just high enough, the flowers sufficiently aromatic, 
the earth just right for solidity and growth." He had no sympathy with 
croakers. " Get down on your knees and thank God that you live now when 
truth is advancing and error is retreating. I had rather live ten years now than 
five hundred in the time of Methuselah. It is a splendid world to live in." 




IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 

A MEMORABLE JOURNEY ACROSS EUROPE ON " A MISSION OE BREAD " — DR. KLOPSCH 
HIS COMPANION — THE GOOD SHIP " LEO'S " REE1EE CARGO EOR RUSSIANS 
FAMINE SUFFERERS — RECEPTION AT ST. PETERSBURG — THE AMERICANS SUM- 
MONED TO THE ROYAL PALACE — DR. TALMAGE AND CZAR ALEXANDER III. 

N the year 1892, three years after his Palestine journey, just two years 
after he had assumed the editorship of The Christian Herald, and while 
he was still in active work in his Brooklyn pastorate, Dr. Talmage had 
one of the most important experiences of his career. That year a 
grievous famine had broken out in sixteen interior provinces of Russia. 
Millions of peasants were suffering the pangs of starvation, and not- 
withstanding the efforts of the imperial government to check the famine, the 
mortality was appalling. The people were reduced to the last extremities, thou- 
sands subsisting on refuse and stable sweepings, mixed and cooked into a horri- 
ble compost, which was fittingly called " hunger bread." 

THE JOURNEY TO RUSSIA BEGUN 

Touched by these sufferings, the benovelent people of the United States 
contributed a fund, through The Christian Herald, for sending a ship-load of food 
to Russia. Dr. Talmage was heart and soul with the enterprise, and urged it 
forward with voice and pen. When the good steamship Leo was chartered by 
The Christian Herald, to carry to Russia the gift of America, Dr. Talmage and 
Dr. Klopsch both preceded her on a swift ocean liner, traveling ai their own 
expense on " a mission of bread." When the Leo reached St. Petersburg the 
two friends were waiting for her, and, in conjunction with the official Russian 
Relief Committee, had made all arrangements for the reception and distribution 
of the cargo of American flour. 

On the way over they had stopped a few days in England. Dr. Talmage 
had a most hearty welcome from his old friend the author and philosopher, John 
Ruskin ; he and his family had dined with Lord and Lady Aberdeen, in London, 
by special invitation, and had been the guests of Lord and Lady Meath and the 
Lord Mayor of London. A pleasant episode was the cordial greeting of the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, who, after congratulations, told Dr. Talmage : " I 
have been reading your sermons for many years." 

199 



200 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



RECEPTION IN THE RUSSIAN CAPITAL 

The Mayor and military authorities of the royal Russian city, prepared a 
splendid reception for their American guests, and on the arrival of the Leo, 
the city took on the appearance of a holiday. Everywhere were flags and 
bunting, and the rejoicing was general. The American flag was raised at the 
United States Legation and Consulate, and Russian and American flags flut- 
tered from the public buildings. Even the street cars were decorated with 
Russian and American flags, and the welcome extended to the visitors from the 
Western continent and their food-laden vessel exceeded in enthusiasm and elab- 
orate display any that had preceded it on similar occasions. 

The Leo was officially welcomed on Thursday morning, July 14, with every 
possible manifestation of joyful popular enthusiasm. The evening before. 
news had been received from Cronstadt that the Leo had passed that point on its 
way to Petersburg and official invitations, signed by Mayor Prokofiero, were 
hastily dispatched in different directions, requesting the presence of the recipi- 




THE CHRISTIAN HERALD FAMINE RELIEF STEAMSHIP " LEO 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 201 

ents at 10:30 in the morning on board the harbor police boat St. Petersburg, 
for the purpose of welcoming the American relief ship. 

THE "LEO'S" WELCOME 

By ten o'clock a tremendous crowd of people had gathered at the Ad- 
miralty Quay, near the Nicholai Bridge, ready to greet the American guests 
as they stepped out of their carriage onto the gang-plank. As the carriage drove 
up to the point and Dr. Talmage assisted Mrs. Klopsch to alight, three vigorous 
cheers went up from thousands of strong, powerful Russian throats, which were 
repeated again and again, as the St. Petersburg steamed out on her way to meet 
the Leo. On board, besides the guests of the occasion, were Mayor Prokofiero, 
the Prefect of Police, Gen. Von Wahl, Marshal of Nobilty, Miss Polootsoff and 
Vsevolovshky, the Major-General of the Imperial Staff, the American Charge 
D'Affaires Furts, Consul-General Crawford, Count Andre Bobrinskoy, mem- 
bers of the Town Council, and others. An hour's sail brought in sight the ma- 
jestic Leo, clad in bright festal array with flying colors from topmast to deck, 
as though herself rejoicing in the glory of her gracious mission. As soon as the 
distance would admit of the voice being heard, three rousing cheers from the 
St. Petersburg brought the captain and some of the crew of the Leo on deck, 
who waved their hands while her whistle blew loud and long in response to the 
cordial greeting. 

UNLOADING THE RELIEF CARGO 

At one o'clock the party returned to the Admiralty Quay, just as the Leo 
was about to drop anchor. Alongside the dock and parallel with the river one 
hundred freight cars elaborately festooned and each decorated with a Russian 
and an American flag, stood ready to receive the flour, destined to save a 
hundred thousand hungry peasants from starvation, in front of the cars, like 
well-disciplined soldiers ready for duty, stood a hundred stalwart stevedores, 
who had nobly volunteered to discharge the Leo's cargo without compensation. 
The anchor once cast, all was bustle and excitement. From thousands of 
throats rang out the loud huzzas like wave upon wave with constantly increas- 
ing enthusiasm. Hats, handkerchiefs and flags were waving in the air with 
rapid motion, and shrill steamboat whistles vainly contended with the great 
volume of human voices for supremacy. 

Comparative silence was at last restored and the visitors could hear what 
was going on in their immediate vicinity. " There are the good Americans ! " 
" How kind they are to us ! " " God bless these good friends ! " "Just to 
think of it — one hundred carloads ! " were some of the remarks which greeted 
their ears and assured them that not only the nobility and the officials, but 
also the people themselves had grateful appreciation of what America had done 
for the Russian nation. The gang-plank was adjusted and Captain Caines, 
of the Leo, was requested to come ashore. 



202 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



The marshal of nobility, Vsevolvshky, took an elevated stand on the plank, 
and, addressing the captain in English, congratulated him on having safely 
made the journey with a ship laden with the tokens of sympathy and love from a 
distant nation. He assured him that his cargo was another bond binding more 
closely together the two great nations. 

A PRESENTATTION INCIDENT 

Then Mayor Prokofiero mounted the improvised platform bearing in his 
hands a handsomely finished oaken box. After the cheering which his appear- 
ance had evoked had subsided, he said: " Gentlemen, the city of St. Petersburg 
greets you and congratulates you on your safe arrival with the cargo presented 
by the generous readers of The Christian Herald to the inhabitants of several 
Russian districts now suffering from the failure of last year's harvest. Grati- 







DR. TALMAGE ADDRESSING RUSSIAN OFFICIALS 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 203 

tude for the contributions of the Americans will set an indelible stamp on the 
hearts of all Russians and will unite together two great nations in the bonds 
of mutual esteem and friendship. The City of St. Petersburg, the capital of all 
Russia, begs of you, gentlemen, to accept these little trifles in memory of this 
day." 

The mayor then opened the case, and displaying a large and beautiful solid 
silver speaking-trumpet, handed it to Captain Caines, and at the same time handed 
the first mate of the Leo a magnificent silver, gold-lined, old-fashioned drink- 
ing cup. Both the captain and mate were so completely taken by surprise that 
they remained mute, and Dr. Talmage, perceiving their confusion, relieved 
them by mounting the gang-plank. The moment he became visible to the 
crowd every voice was hushed, and throughout his address, which lasted about 
fifteen minutes, complete silence prevailed except where here and there broken 
by applause. Dr. Talmage said in substance as follows : 

DR.. TALMAGE'S REMARKS 

" Friendship for each other seems to have been handed down by the 
American and Russian nations as a legacy from generation to generation. 
From the earliest days of our national existence we have ever esteemed Russia 
as a warm, unselfish friend and ever have there been evidences of mutual 
friendship and esteem. When last spring the American people heard that cer- 
tain districts of this vast empire were suffering from famine, and that people 
were perishing from want of food, their practical sympathy was immediately 
enlisted, and with willing hearts and open hand contributions for relief funds 
poured in. Rich and poor, old and young gave, and gave gladly. The cargo 
here before you represents the contributions of Christian people, many of 
whom gave when giving meant for them less bread in the cupboard, that starv- 
ing Russia might have more, but so deep-rooted is the desire to do good in 
the hearts of these godly people, that when The Christian Herald, a few months 
ago, published an appeal, money began to pour in from every quarter of our 
great land, and many who had no money sent their earrings, and their brace- 
lets while children sent their savings, the result of self-denial for years, in or- 
der that Russian children might no longer go hungry, and we had to call, ' down 
brakes ' to stop the flow. . 

A CHRISTLIKE MISSION 

" To-day we come to your shores with bread for the hungry, and you re- 
ceive us in such royal fashion. Should famine ever visit our own beloved land — 
and no country is safe — we are sure that your s c hips would land on our shores 
on similar Christlike mission, and then we will receive you with the same loving 
cordiality that to-day you have accorded us. God bless America! God bless 
Russia ! God save your great and grand Emperor ! God save our President ! " 



204 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



In Russia there are many who can speak or at least understand English, 
and there was a goodly sprinkling of them in the crowd at the wharf on that 
occasion. Every patriotic allusion was vociferously cheered, and when Dr. Tal- 
mage pathetically told of the self-denial of American men, women and' children 
in order that they might be represested in The Christian Herald cargo, many 
were affected to tears. After Dr. Talmage finished his address. Dr. Talmage and 
Mrs. Klopsch drove to their hotel, while Mr. Klopsch and Count Bobrinskoy 
remained and saw a portion of the cargo dispatched for the interior. 

ENTHUSIASM AT THE DUHMA 

The American visitors were next honored with an official reception from 
the Town Council, the assembly meeting in the brilliantly decorated halls of the 
Duhma. Shortly before three o'clock the invited guests, the members of the 
Town Council, and other municipal dignitaries began to arrive in the Alexandcr 
Hall, which was decorated with tropical plants and with Russian and American 
flags. Among the visitors were General Wahl and his wife, and a great num- 
ber of Russian officials. The galleries were crowded by the general public, 
many ladies being present. . . . Precisely on the stroke of three the chief 




DR. TALMAGE SALUTES THE) RUSSIAN PEOPLE 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



205 



guests of honor of the day, Dr. Talmage and Dr. Klopsch, accompanied by the 
American Consul and Mrs. Klopsch, appeared on the scene, and were accompa- 
nied to the platform by Herr Prokofjew (representing the chief magistrate), who 
had met them on the steps of the Duhma (also resplendent in festive decora- 
tion). They took the seats of honor amid loud cheers and vehement applause 
from the public. Herr Prokofjew presided in the centre of the table. On his 
right sat Dr. Talmage, and on his left Dr. Klopsch, the magistrates and council- 
lors on either side. Herr Prokofjew opened the proceedings by reading the 
address of thanks drawn up by the Town Council, which he then, amid enthusi- 
astic cheers, handed over to the pastor. Dr. Talmage then rose, and replied 
m a speech which made a deep impression, and was repeatedly interrupted by 
applause. 

DR. TALMAGE'S ELOQUENT REPLY 

Dr. Talmage chose the thrilling subject of the relief of the poor and needy, 
and the no less impressive theme of the brotherly union of both nations. 
" Come to America; come to New York; come to my home," he cried. " You 
will find we have Russian books, Russian music, Russian pictures on the walls 
of our reception rooms and studies. Come and see us." Continuing he said: 

"You are now so near that when the harvests failed in one part of your 
empire, and hunger with white teeth gnawed on the lives of millions of your 




dr. talmage: GO£S to cronstadt 



2o6 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



people, we heard the cry across the Atlantic and looking into the face of wife 
and children we said : ' This must not be. That is the hungry cry of our Russian 
brothers and sisters, for we are all blood relations, since God hath made of one 
blood all nations to dwell upon the face of the earth.' Then the grain poured 
from our national wheat-bins, and it was ground into flour, and, with the bless- 
ing of God and our nation, we launched it for Europe, and it is here, and we 
hand over to you a solemn sacrament of bread from nation to nation, and we 
join you in beating back the wolves of hunger to their jungle, and under the 
blessing of the Lord we hope that soon there will be bread enough and to 
spare, and no one perishing with hunger. 

" When last Thursday morning we saw the freight cars roll down to the 
wharf to take the flour our ship Leo was about to unload, and the Russian flag 




THE OVATION TO THE AMERICANS 



floated above one car and the American flag floated over another, and in that 
order all the long train was decorated, I said within myself, ' So may it always 
be.' And until the day when the angel, with one foot on the sea and the other 
foot on the land, shall swear by him that liveth forever and ever that time shall 
be no longer, may the Russian flag and the American flag move on in the same 
procession. And if any arm shall ever be lifted to strike down that feeling of 
international brotherhood, may that arm, from shoulder-blade to finger-tip, 
wither ! 

" We come at our own personal expense, and not a farthing of the money 
raised for the sufferers goes to pay our expenses. We come for the joy of 
seeing the food started for the afflicted districts, towards which the freight cars 
are now rumbling on their way. Thanks upon thanks ! When we get back 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



207 



to our own beloved America, we will tell of your magnificent treatment of us, 
and if ever we want in two words to express all geniality, all sympathy, all gen- 
erosity, all kindness, we will select, for those two words — Russian hospitality S 
God bless you all ! May none of us ever know what a bitter thing it is for our 
children to cry for bread when there is no flour in the house. Upon us may 
there come the benediction of the Book which says, ' Blessed is the man that 
considereth the poor. The Lord will deliver him in the time of trouble.' ' : 

The speech lasted over half an hour ; at its close the audience burst into a 
storm of applause, which seemed as if it would never end. The strains of the 




THE WELCOME BY COUNT BOBRINSKOY 



Russian and American national hymns, the applause of the ladies, and the hur- 
rahing of the public blended into one tumultuous sound. When at length it 
died away, Dr. Klopsch made a short speech, also Count Bobrinskoy and M. 
Sangalli, both speaking in excellent English. The meeting broke up soon 
after five o'clock. Dr. Talmage, Dr. Klopsch and his wife, greeted as they left 
the building with loud hurrahs by an enormous public, entered an open carriage 
and drove between lines of waving caps and handkerchiefs to the Hotel 
d'Europe. Here they were awaited by a fresh concourse of people, and enthusi- 



201 



T. DE WITT TALLAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



astically greeted. Dr. Talmage was at once raised by a dozen strong Russian 
arms and chaired amid loud hurrahs. When the Americans had disappeared 
into the hotel, the people still pressed round the doors, and they had to show 
themselves on the hotel balcony. 

ONE HUNDRED CAHS OF FOOD 

The task of unloading the Leo was hurried forward and the relief cargo of 
15,000 sacks of flour, besides corn and delicacies for the sick, was shipped by 
rail to the famine provinces. One hundred railway cars, loaded with flour were 




ON THE REEIEE STEAMSHIP LEO 



soon started for the interior. The cars were handsomely decorated with flags 
and their departure was witnessed by a large gathering of citizens. Sixty 
thousand pounds of flour and a quantity of chocolate, condensed milk and 
delicacies for invalids were sent to Count Tolstoi, for use in his relief work in 
the stricken villages. He was heartily co-operating with the Americans in for- 
warding the new supplies to the stricken districts. 

On the following day the party were conveyed on a private yacht to the 
beautiful imperial Summer Palace at Peterhof, eighteen miles west of the capital, 
on the south coast of the Gulf of Finland. When the American visitors arrived 
at the landing they were met by the imperial carriages and an escort and were 
driven to the palace. 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



209 



LUNCHEON IN A ROYAL PALACE 

After inspecting the building and grounds they were entertained at lunch- 
eon. The palace itself is a huge structure, eighty feet high and four hundred 
and fifty feet in length, curving around an open space in the heart of the city. 
It is not now used as a royal residence but it is opened for receptions, concerts 
and imperial ceremonials. An army of servants dwells there. There are in 
the palace more than twenty immense halls, with corresponding suits of apart- 
ments, connected by great corridors and galleries. Seven large halls are filled 
with paintings of battles and naval engagements ; a hall dedicated to Peter the 
Great, another to St. George and a third to Nicholas, the patron saint of Rus- 




GOING TO TH£ DUHMA '(TOWN HAIjJ, ST. P£T£RSBURG 



sia. Anything richer, or more splendid and dazzling than these superb apart- 
ments it would be difficult to conceive. The unrivalled magnificence of each 
represents a fortune. The exotic gardens turn the Russian winter into sum- 
mer. On the third floor of this great building are the crowns and diadems of 
the rulers of Russia for many generations. 

The imperial invitation summoning Dr. Talmage and Dr. Klopsch to 
Peterhof was a pleasant surprise. The Russian summer is at its height in 

July; evenings are a long twilight, with but little real darkness; the days long 
14 



2IO 



T. DE WITT TAEMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



and pleasant. At eleven p. M. it is almost as light as at seven p. m. in America. 
It is the recreation time of the empire, when the wealthy leave the cities and 




DR. TALMAGE CHAIRED AT ST. PETERSBURG 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



211 



seek the cool delights of the islands in the Neva. Dr. Talmage and Dr. Klopsch, 
on arriving at the Peterhof wharf, entered the court carriages that stood in 
waiting for them, and, accompanied by an escort, proceeded to the famous 
palace. Cossack guards in dark uniforms and high military officials were 
encountered on the way. The palace is a two-story, yellow building, and is 
situated on high ground overlooking beautiful gardens and groves. Fountains 
throw their sparkling columns of spray far up in the air, and the variety of 
flowering plants is equal to that of any garden in Europe. The grounds are 
laid out after the fashion of the famous gardens at Versailles, with fountains, 
miniature lakes, statuary and water scenes. 

Peterhof is attractive less from the architectural style of the palace than 
from its romantic surroundings, and the art treasures it contains. In one room 




ST. Isaac's cathedral, st. Petersburg 



there are eight hundred and sixty historic portraits of beautiful women, painted 
during the reign of Empress Catherine II. It contains also the room used by 
Peter the Great as a study and in it are shown some of the workman-Czar's 
personal belongings. There are also in the palace many other memorials of 



Russian sovereigns. 



PRESENTED TO NICHOLAS 

Count Bobrinskoy, of the relief committee, who accompanied the guests to 
the palace, introduced them to the Czarewitch (the present Czar). Then, after 
most cordial greetings, they heard from the lips of the representative of royalty 



212 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



an expression of the gratitude and affection Russia felt toward this country. 
The young prince asked them to bear to the people of America Russia's thanks 
for the aid it had received in time of need. He talked very freely and heartily 
with the visitors and showed a great interest in American affairs. After the 
interview the visitors dined at the palace. 

Their last clay in St. Petersburg before leaving for Moscow was an ex- 
busy one. At noon they met a distinguished company at the 



ceedingh 




the; imperial carriage waiting for the Americans 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



213 



American Legation, among those present being the Prefect of St. Petersburg, 
the marshals, several members of the nobility and Count Bobrinskoy. At three 




CZAR ALEXANDER AND FAMILY 



214 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

o'clock they were tendered an official reception at the City Hall, which was 
elaborately decorated. 

The Mayor presided and the entire City Council was on the platform. Two 
bouquets of beautiful flowers were presented to Mrs. Klopsch by the city offi- 
cials. The Mayor welcomed the visitors and presented them with an address, 
bound in silver, illuminated, with a vignette by the celebrated Russian aquarelle 
artist, Eytkin, representing- a view of the Winter Palace and the Neva Quay. 
On the volume was the inscription : " To The Christian Herald, represented by 
Dr. Talmage, its Editor, and Dr. Klopsch, its Proprietor ; by the City of 
Petersburg, 1892.'' In the evening, the party left for Moscow, being escorted 
to the train by the mayor and a delegation of City Councilmen. The Weiner 
Tagblatt, one of the leading newspapers, declared that the four absorbing topics 
were : Cholera, hunger, Szarantscha, and the Leo, with its " tokens of love from 
America for the starving moujiks." 

URGING THE RELIEF WORK 

Every facility was placed at the disposal of the visitors that would expedite 
the work of forwarding the cargo to the interior. Count Bobrinskoy, Count * 
Tolstoi (who has established a number of soup kitchens and relief stations in the 
afflicted provinces), and other gentlemen gave material assistance. The gov- 
ernment furnished all needed facilities for transportation. A portion of the 
cargo, including some delicacies for convalescents, was sent to Count Tolstoi, 
as we have already stated, and the remainder was dispatched by rail to Central 
Russia, where reliable distributors were waiting to receive it. 

THE CZAR.S "ARROW LINE" 

From St. Petersburg to Moscow, the railway is a straight line of four 
hundred miles. " I wish it built thus," explained Czar Nicholas I. when con- 
sulted, and he indicated a course like that of an arrow in flight. " Xo matter 
what it costs," he added, perceiving the surprise of his engineers, the chief of 
whom was an American. The route lies through many forests and there is, in 
the entire distance, only one town nearer the track than eight miles — the town 
of Tver. Russians are very proud of this arrow line, and pronounce it the 
finest and best equipped in the world. Arrived at Moscow, the travelers found 
themselves in a large building of stone on the city's outskirts, as all Russian 
railway stations are located. 

At Moscow the visitors were the special guests of the Mayor, and here they 
were able to direct satisfactorily the work of distribution, being in communica- 
tion with the agents operating in the suffering provinces. 

In the intervals of leisure they were driven by their municipal hosts to the 
Kremlin, which contains the great treasures of " Holy Moscow," and the Tower 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



215 



of Ivan and the cathedrals were also visited. Before leaving the city they were 
entertained formally by the Mayor, who expressed anew Russia's gratitude to 
America and especially to the contributors of the Leo's cargo, and conferred 
upon Dr. Talmage and Dr. Klopsch, in their behalf, the freedom of the city. 

On returning to St. Petersburg, an equerry of the Emperor awaited them 
with a summons for Dr. Talmage to repair immediately to Peterhof. He com- 
plied with the request, and at once accompanied the escort to the palace, where 




DR. LOUIS KLOPSCH 
Proprietor of The Christian Herald and Lifelong Friend of Dr. Talmage, the Editor 



2l6 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



he was met by the Court Chamberlain, who conducted him to a suite of apart- 
ments where he rested an hour after the hurried eighteen-mile trip. 



IN THE IMPER.IAL PRESENCE 

He was then presented to the Emperor Alexander III., who received him 
with the greatest cordiality, and in the name of Russia warmly thanked the 
American people and The Christian Herald contributors for their great kindness 
and munificent liberality toward his suffering subjects. This was followed by 
a long conversation, which touched on subjects political and religious, after 
which the Emperor presented his visitors to the Empress and the members of 
the Imperial family, each of whom greeted Dr. Talmage cordially in turn. After 
a short, pleasant and quiet informal talk, he returned to the capital. 

Their work in Russia accomplished, the party left St. Petersburg the same 
evening, being escorted to the railway depot by the members of the Citv Coun- 




FAREWEXL BANQUET TO THE) AMERICANS IN RUSSIA 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 217 

cil. A great crowd filled the station and the leave-taking was an affectionate 
one. They took with them the pleasant remembrances of a grateful people, all 
classes, from nobility to moujik, having vied with each other in tokens of appre- 
ciation of their mission as the envoys of Christian America to afflicted Russia. 

A REMINISCENCE OF EMPER.OR. ALEXANDER. 

His Russian visit (which was repeated years afterward) made a lasting 
impression on Dr. Talmage. Speaking of the late Czar Alexander, he said that 
ruler talked with him for a long time on religious, social, and political ques- 
tions. What most struck Dr. Talmage and what he commented on most fre- 
quently when talking of his meeting with the Czar was that the bomb-threatened 
autocrat seemed to be entirely without fear. 

" Perhaps he is used to the thought of being assassinated," suggested one 
of Dr. Talmage's friends. 

" Ah, no," said the great preacher. " But he is ready, and when a man is 
always ready to die, why should he be afraid of the form in which death may 
come? A finer, nobler fellow than the Czar of Russia I never met." 

In a sermon delivered after his return from Russia, Dr. Talmage described 
the great famine in these eloquent words : 

" You know why I went to Russia. There are many thousands of people 
who have a right to say to me, as was said in the Bible parable : ' Give account 
of thy stewardship.' Through The Christian Herald, which I have the honor to 
edit, we had for months, in publisher's, in reportorial, and editorial column, put 
before the people the ghastly facts concerning twenty million Russians who 
were starving to death, and subscriptions to the Relief Fund had come by letters 
that seemed not so much written with ink as with tears, some of the letters 
practically saying : ' We find it hard to get bread for our own families, but we 
cannot stand this cry of hunger from beyond the seas, and so please to receive 
the enclosed.' And others had sent jewels from their hands and necks, saying: 
' Sell these and turn them into bread.' And another letter said : ' Enclosed is 
an old gold piece. It was my mother's. She gave it to me and told me never 
to part with it, except for bread, and now I enclose it.' 

THREE MILLION POUNDS OF FLOUR. 

" We had gathered thirty-five thousand dollars in money, which we turned 
into three million pounds of flour. When I went down to the Board of Trade 
at Chicago and left $5,000 of the amount raised with a prominent flour merchant, 
taking no receipt, and leaving all to him to do the best thing, and returned, it 
was suggested that I had not done things in a business way. How could we 
know what sort of flour would be sent ? There are styles of flour more fit for 
the trough of the swine than the mouths of hungry men and women. Well, as 



2l8 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



is customary, when the flour came to New York, it was tested, and we found 
indeed they had cheated us. They gave us better flour than we had bought. 
I bought in Chicago fine flour, but they sent us superfine. God bless the mer- 
chants of Chicago ! 

WHAT FAMINE MEANS IN RUSSIA 

" Now, we know nothing about famine in America. The grasshoppers 
may kill the crops in Kansas, the freshets may destroy the crops along the Ohio, 
the potato worm may kill the vines of Long Island, the rust may get into the 
wheat of Michigan, yet when there has been dreadful scarcity in some parts of 
the land, there has been plenty in other parts. But in districts of Russia, vast 
enough to drop several nations into them, drought for six consecutive years 




SUMMER PALACE OP THE CZAR AT PETERHOP 



has devastated and these districts were previously the most productive of all the 
empire. It was like what we would have in America if the hunger somehow 
got out of hell and alighted in our land, and swept his wing over Minnesota, 
and said : ' Let nothing grow here,' and over Missouri, and said : ' Let nothing 
grow here,' and over New York State, and said: ' Let nothing grow here,' and 
over Ohio, and Georgia, and Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and Nebraska, 
and Dakota, and the Carolinas, and said : ' Let nothing grow here,' and the hun- 
ger fiend had swept the same withering and blasting wing over the best parts of 
America in the years 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891 and 1892, and finally all our 
families were put on small allowance, and we all had risen from the table hun- 
gry, and after awhile the children had only quarter enough, and after awhile 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 219 

only one meal a day, and after awhile no good food at all, but a mixture of 
wheat and chaff and bark of trees, and then three of the children down with 
hunger typhus, and then all the family unable to walk, and then crawling on 
hands and knees, and then one dead in each room, and neighbors, not quite so 
exhausted, coming in to bury them, and afterwards the house becoming the 
tomb, with none to carry the dead to more appropriate sepulchre — whole fam- 
ilies blotted out. 

" That was what occurred in Russia in homes more than were ever 
counted, in homes that were once as comfortable and happy and bountiful as 
yours or mine, in homes as virtuous as yours or mine, in homes where God is 
worshiped as much as in yours or mine. 

SAVING ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND LIVES 

" It was to do a little something towards beating back that Archangel of 
Wretchedness and Horror that we went, and we have now to report that, accord- 
ing to the estimate of the Russian Famine Relief Committee, we saved the 
lives of one hundred and twenty-five thousand people. 

" As at the hunger relief stations, the bread was handed out — for it was 
made into loaves and distributed — many people would halt before taking it and 
religiously cross themselves and utter a prayer for the donors. Some of them 
would come staggering back, and say: 'Please tell us who sent this bread to us.' 
And when told it came from America, they would say: ' What part of America? 
Please give us the names of those who sent it.' Ah, God only knows the names 
of those who sent it, but he certainly does know, and many a prayer is going 
up, I warrant you, day by day for those who sent flour by the ship Leo. Per- 
haps some of us at our tables rattle off a prayer that may mean nothing, although 
we call it ' Saying Grace,' but I warrant when those people who received 
the bread which saved their lives 'said grace,' it meant something. 

RELIGION IN RUSSIA 

" I tell you plainly, as I told Emperor Alexander III. in the palace at Peter- 
hof, that I had never been so impressed with the fidelity to their religion of any 
people as by what I had seen in Russia, and especially among her public men. 
I said respectfully to a Russian, when I saw him cross himself : ' What do you 
do that for? ' ' Oh,' he said, ' when I do that I always say: ' God have mercy 
on me ! ' 

"But, I have been asked by good people in Great Britain and America 
again and again, why did not the prosperous people of Russia stop that suffer- 
ing themselves, making it useless for other nations to help? And I am always 
glad when I hear the question asked, because it gives me an opportunitv of 
explaining. Have you any idea what it requires to feed twenty million people ? 



220 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



There is only one Being in the universe who can do it, and that is the Being 
who, this morning, breakfasted sixteen hundred million of the human race. 

" The nobility of Russia have not only contributed most lavishly, but many 
of them went down and stayed for months amid the ghastliness and the horror 
and the typhus fever and the smallpox, that they might administer to the suf- 
fering. I sat at the dining table in the house of one of our American represen- 
tatives beside a baroness, who had not only impoverished her estate by her con- 




DR. TALMAGE S MEETING WITH THE CZAR 



tributions to the suffering, but who left her own home and went down into the 
worst of the misery, toiling until prostrated by fever ; then reviving and toiling 
on until prostrated by the smallpox. She had come home to get a little strength, 
and in a few days she was going down again to the suffering districts, and she 
commissioned me to execute in America a literary enterprise by which she 
expected with her pen more money, all of which was to go for bread to those 
who lacked it. 



IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 221 

" Then there are the Bobrinskoys. They are of the nobility, not only the 
nobility of earth but the nobility of heaven. The emperor has made larger 
contributions toward this relief fund than any monarch ever made for any 
cause since the world stood, and the superb kindness written all over the faces 
of Emperor and Empress and Crown Prince is demonstrated in what they have 
already done and are doing for the sufferers in their own country. 

IMPERIAL BENEFICENCE 

"When I read in the papers later that the Emperor and Empress, hearing 
an explosion, stopped the royal railtrain to find out what accident had occur- 
red, and the Empress knelt down by the side of a wounded laborer and held 
his head until pillows and blankets could be brought, and the two wounded 
men were put upon the royal train to be carried to a place where they could be 
better cared for, I said to my wife : ' Just like her.' When I saw afterward in 
the papers, that the Emperor and Empress had walked through the wards of the 
most virulent cholera, talking with the patients, shaking hands with them and 
cheering them up, it was no surprise to me, for I said to myself: ' That is just 
like them.' Any one who has ever seen the royal family will believe anything 
in the way of kindness ascribed to them, and will join me in the execration of 
that too prevalent opinion that a tyrant is on the throne of Russia. If God 
spares my life, I will yet show by facts beyond dispute that the most slandered 
and systematically lied about nation on earth is Russia, and that no ruler ever 
lived more for the elevation of his people in education and morals and religion 
than Alexander III. 

" I said at St. Petersburg to the most eminent lady of Russia outside of the 
Imperial family : ' Are those stories of cruelty and outrage that I have heard 
and read about true? ' She replied: 4 Xo doubt some of them are true, but do 
you not in America ever have officers of the law cruel and outrageous in their 
treatment of offenders ? Do you not have instances where the police have 
clubbed innocent persons ? Have you no instances where people in brief 
authority act arrogantly? ' I replied : ' Yes, we do.' Then she said : ' Why does 
the world hold our government responsible for exceptional outrages? As 
soon as an official is found to be cruel, he immediately loses his place.' 

A GIGANTIC NATION 

" Then I bethought myself : Do the people in America hold the government 
at Washington responsible for the Homestead riots at Pittsburg, or for railroad 
insurrection, or for the torch of the villain that consumes a block of houses, or 
for the ruffians who arrest a railtrain, making the passengers hold up their 
arms until the pockets are picked? Why, then, hold the Emperor of Russia 
responsible for the wrongs enacted in a nation with a population twice as large 



222 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND ^ T ORK 



: ■ j ; MsS;y: : : ■; ■ ; ;■: - -^:s§:- .x^:;^ 







IN RUSSIA'S ROYAL PALACES 



223 



in numbers as the millions of America? As a nation is only a man or a 
woman on a big scale, let me ask, would you individually prefer to be judged 
by your faults or your virtues ? All people, except ourselves, have faults. 

RUSSIA. AMERICA'S FRIEND 

"It is most important that this country have right ideas concerning Rus- 
sia, for, among all the nations this side of heaven, Russia is America's best 
friend. There has not been an hour in the last seventy-five years that the 
shipwreck of free institutions in America would not have called forth from all 




GOLD ENAMELED TEA SERVICE 

Presented by Alexander III., Emperor of Russia, to T. De Witt Talmage, through Prince Catacuzene, 
Russian Minister to United States, in Philadelphia Harbor, on Russian warship, June, 1892 

the despotisms of Europe and Asia a shout of gladness wide as earth and deep 
as perdition. But whoever else failed us, Russia never did, and whoever else 
was doubtful, Russia never was. Russia, then an old government, smiled on the 
cradle of our government while yet in its earliest infancy. Empress Catherine 
of Russia in 1776, or thereabouts, offered kindly interference that our thirteen 
colonies might not go down under the cruelties of war. 

" Again, in 1813, Russia stretched forth toward us a merciful hand. When 
our dreadful Civil War was raging and the two thunder clouds of Northern and 



224 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



Southern valor clashed, Russia practically said to the nations of Europe : ' Keep 
your hands off and let the brave men of the North and the South settle their 
own troubles. I rehearsed some of those scenes to the emperor, saying - : 'You 
were probably too young to remember the position your father took at that 
time,' but with radiant smile, he responded : ' Oh, yes, I remember, I remem- 
ber,' and there was an accentuation of the words which demonstrated to me 
that these occurrences had often been talked of. 

A WORTHY PREFECT 

" I had a long ride in St. Petersburg and its suburbs with a Prefect, a bril- 
liant, efficient and lovely man, who is the highest official in the city of St. Peters- 
burg, and whose chief business is to attend the emperor. I said to him : ' I 
suppose your religion is that of the Greek Church ? ' ' No,' said he, ' I am a 
Lutheran.' 'What is your religion?' I said to one of the highest and most 
influential officials at St. Petersburg. He said : ' I am of the Church of England.' 
Myself, an American, of still another denomination of Christians, and never 
having been inside a Greek Church in my life until I went to Russia, could not 
have received more consideration had I been baptized in the Greek Church and 
all my life worshiped at her altars. I had it demonstrated to me very plainly 
that a man's religion in Russia has nothing to do with his preferment for either 
office or social position. The only questions taken into such consideration are 
honesty, fidelity, morality and adaptation. 1 had not been in St. Petersburg an 
hour before I received an invitation to preach the Gospel of Christ as I 
believed it. 

" You may go right up to St. Petersburg, and Moscow, with your Episcopal 
liturgy, or your Presbyterian catechism, or your Congregationalisms Liberalism, 
or your Immersionist's Baptistry, or any other religion, and if you mind your 
own affairs and let others mind theirs, you will not be molested." 





THE SILVER. JUBILEE 

AN UNPRECEDENTED TRIBUTE TO THE GREAT PREACHER — THE GLORY OF" THE TAB- 
ERNACLE — A MEMORABLE ASSEMBLAGE ADDRESSED BY MANY EMINENT DIVINES 
— CONGRATULATIONS PROM DISTINGUISHED PERSONS AT HOME AND ABROAD 
ON DR. TALM AGE'S REMARKABLE PASTORATE 



HE closing of Dr. Talmage's ministry in Brooklyn was brilliant beyond 
description. The great Tabernacle, the most splendid in all the list, 
was at last completed. Dr. Talmage himself had preached, lectured, 
written and appealed every day in the week, month after month, to 
bring about the triumph of the splendid enterprise. Of all those who 
sacrificed for the success of the Tabernacle, none gave so liberally 

as he, both of work and money, towards carrying his conception of a colossal, 

grand, triumphant Tabernacle to success. 

THE MOST GLORIOUS HOUR. OF HIS LIFE 

as considered by him, was when the oratorio of dedication resounded through 
its spacious naves, and the doors were thrown wide open to people of every 
faith, and in which charity and brotherhood had a permanent abiding-place. 

The heavy burdens carried by Dr. Talmage in the building of the last 
splendid Tabernacle had brought him to the point where he had great need of 
rest. And as he was nearing the close of the twenty-fifth year of his pastorate 
in Brooklyn, he was urged by his congregation to take an outing. Having 
determined on a vacation, he resolved to make a tour of the globe ; not as a 
tourist, Hut rather as a pastor who visits his communicants, for as Dr. Talmage 
had for a long while preached through the newspapers to more than twenty- 
five millions of persons every week, and in nearly all the languages of civiliza- 
tion, wherever he might travel he would be certain to find many who were 
regular readers of his sermons. 

When the purpose of Dr. Talmage became known, it was immediately pro- 
posed by many prominent citizens of Brooklyn to fittingly celebrate the twenty- 
fifth anniversary of his pastorate in that city. The suggestion was hailed with 
such universal approval that the movement spread all over the country, and 
thence to Europe, and to all Christendom, until, to satisfy the demand, the 
15 225 



2.26 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

demonstration took the form of a national and international reception, which 
was to be given in the great Tabernacle on the tenth and eleventh of Mav, 




THK LAST BROOKLYN TABLRNACLL 
This Was the Largest Protestant Church in America, and, Like its Two Predecessors, was Consumed by Fire 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 227 

1894, three days before the day he had appointed for starting upon a circum- 
navigation of the earth. 

For this magnificent jubilee commemoration, which was at once ovation 
and paean, the great church building was splendidly and elaborately decorated 
with banners and flags. On the front of the great organ was a large portrait of 
Dr. Talmage, surrounded by a cluster of American flags and flags of other 
nations. Underneath was the inscription : " Tabernacle, his pulpit ; the world, 
his audience." The back of the platform was hung with crimson plush, 
embroidered with gold. In the centre stood an enormous bouquet of lilies 
and roses. The front of the galleries was draped with plush, heavily embroid- 
ered in gold, and 

EVERYWHERE WERE THE STARS AND STRIPES 

draping the cornices and windows, twined about pillars and outlined against 
the other hangings, so that the American flag dominated the building and the 
occasion. And how grandly appropriate were these embellishments, for next 
to his allegiance to Christ, Dr. Talmage acknowledged with loyal pride his lov- 
ing fealty to his country. 

Eight o'clock was the hour appointed for the beginning of the celebrative 
services in the Tabernacle, but long before that time a tremendous crowd had 
gathered about the building, completely blocking, with a jam of eager humanity, 
several squares. By seven o'clock, before the front doors were opened, the 
immense edifice, capable of seating comfortably 5,000 persons, was filled to its 
utmost limit, save the platform, which had been reserved for special guests and 
those having in charge the commemorative exercises. When the hour of eight 
arrived services were opened by the organist, Henry Eyre Browne, rendering a 
brilliant composition of his own for the occasion, entitled ''The Talmage Silver 
Anniversarv March," which was received with great applause. 

When the last note of the organ died away, and expectation was on tip- 
toe, a distinguished company of participants, headed by the Mayor of Brooklyn 
(Mr. Schieren). filed out of the pastor's room and upon the platform, followed 
by Dr. Talmage himself, whose face was radiant with good-will and gratitude. 
The exercises of celebration began by the entire audience singing the doxology, 
after which the Rev. James M. Farrar offered a prayer, then followed the intro- 
duction by Mr. Dimon, one of the trustees, of Mayor Schieren, who had been 
chosen to preside. 

The first night of the commemoration was a distinctively Brooklyn cele- 
bration, and nearly all the speakers were notables of that city, among the 
number being distinguished Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and many 
representatives of other denominations, besides the most prominent officials 
and citizens of Brooklyn. Mayor Schieren welcomed the vast audience in a 
speech of much warmth and congratulation, wherein he paid a splendid tribute 
to Dr. Talmage and to his congregation ; other eloquent speakers delivered 



228 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

wan 




THE SILVER JUBILEE 229 

encomiums on the genius and work of the great preacher, which were received 
with the heartiest acclamations from the delighted gathering. Those who thus 
addressed the vast audience on the first night of the celebration were : Hon. 
Charles A. Schieren, Editor Bernard Peters, Rev. Father Sylvester Malone, 
Rev. Dr. John F. Carson, ex-Mayor David A. Boody, Rev. Dr. Gregg, Rabbi 
F. De Sol. Mendes, Rev. Dr. Louis Albert Banks, Hon. John Winslow, Rev. 
Spencer F. Roche, and Rev. A. C. Dixon. 

Great enthusiasm pervaded the meeting when the Rev. Sylvester Malone, 

A VENERABLE CATHOLIC PRIEST 

of great learning and eloquence, took the platform and delivered a brief address. 
He began by saying that this was probably the first occasion in America where 
a Catholic priest had appeared on a platform in a Protestant church to honor 
a Protestant minister. This remark was loudly applauded. The venerable 
priest added : 

"Here I have the honor to be present and add my poor words to the 
praises that are so justly merited by your worthy pastor. He is the friend of 
all. Where did he ever drop the word that would be offensive to any Catholic 
priest? I have never read of it, nor has any other Catholic ever read of it. 
My religion has never been insulted by him. He has advocated his own religion 
on such broad catholic principles that it is true of him that he has twenty-five 
millions of readers ever}* week throughout the English-speaking world. It is 
because his principles are so thoroughly catholic that he carries with him the 
deep, fundamental principles of the Catholic religion. He carries with him the 
profound 

REVERENCE FOR. THE MASTER. 

of us all. the Saviour of the world, and it is in this, as in his generous and 
kind nature, that he has the mastery of all these minds, and these many souls, 
and is so great a success in the magnificent work he has done in the past, 
and I hope he will live a thousand years to continue it." 

The next speaker was the Rev. Dr. David Gregg, pastor of the Lafayette 
Avenue Presbyterian Church, of Brooklyn. Dr. Gregg's remarks frequently 
elicited applause from the great audience, which, filling every nook of the vast 
building, even to the highest galleries, listened with rapt attention and quick 
appreciation to the addresses. Dr. Gregg, among other remarks, said : 

"There is only one Dr. Talmage. There is more or less Talmage in 
every minister, but he is all Talmage. He lives among us unique. There is 
but one man in the American pulpit that can draw, and hold, and thrill, 
twice every Sabbath the year round, an audience of 8.000. There is but one 
man on the globe that preaches the Gospel every week through the press to 
25,000,000. There is only one man living who, in taking a trip around the 
world, can say : ' I am simply out for a season of pastoral calls. I am taking a 



230 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




THE GREAT JARDTNE ORGAN IN THE BROOKLYN TABERNACLE 
The Platform is shown Decorated During the Harvest Festival 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 



231 



walk among the people of my congregation.' There is only one Dr. Talmage. 
With this fact before my mind I come to this great meeting to-night to congratu- 
late our municipality that Dr. Talmage is a citizen of Brooklyn ; to congratulate 
this vast church that Dr. Talmage is still the pastor of the Brooklyn 
Tabernacle, and to congratulate my brethren in the ministry that Dr. Talmage 
is still a member of the Brooklyn Presbytery in good and regular standing. 
As his nearest Presbyterian neighbor, and as one of the delegates of the 
Brooklyn Presbytery appointed to stand on this platform, I bring to Dr. Tal- 
mage and his great flock the goodwill and the prayers and the Godspeed of 
the Presbyterian community in this city of churches. I have come to this 
meeting to-night for another reason. It is a reason which all the ministers 
here have for coming. I come, as my brethren here come, to demonstrate to 
the public the freedom from jealousy which characterizes the men of the 
American pulpit. We heartily rejoice in the success of every true man of 






'•/ 



R£V. J. P. PARRAR, D.D. 



S. P. C ADM AN 



God, and we are glad of the opportunity to pay to every such man the tribute 
which he has lawfully earned. While I disclaim all jealousy, and to-night 
willingly pay the tribute of praise to my beloved brother who rounds out a 
quarter of a century of multitudinous and successful labors in this Tabernacle, I 
am honest enough to confess that I should like to be able to preach with a 
power that could set all these flags afloat and at full mast. The man who can 
do that is entitled to be circled round and round, and to be saluted by these 



232 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

flags as Dr. Talmage is on this occasion. As I have seen Dr. Talmage from 
the pew, I consider him the greatest word painter on any continent of earth. 

HE PAINTS FOR. CHRIST 

"He thinks in pictures, and he who thinks in pictures thinks vividly. He 
paints with a large brush, with colors that burn and glow, and nations gather 
around his pictures and feel an uplift and a holy thrill. There is one thing 
which Dr. Talmage is able to use beyond any man I have ever heard speak, 
and that is the rhetorical pause. He makes his sermons vivid and impressive 
with the flash of a golden silence. Having rounded his period and finished 
his point he stops until the hush of heaven fills the house and until the audience 
has felt the power of God's truth." 

The Rev. Dr. John F. Carson, Pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church, 
Brooklyn, was the next speaker, calling special attention to the fact that the 
sermons preached from the Tabernacle pulpit had always emphasized the 
abiding power and vitality of the Gospel, and stimulated ministers everywhere 
to preach the old story. Among other things he said : 

" We honor Dr. Talmage because of his faithful presentation of the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ. Were I asked to express in a sentence the substance of the 
preaching in the Tabernacle pulpit, I could find no better sentence than this: 
' I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and him 
crucified.' From this pulpit there has gone out into all the w r orld the ringing 
message, ' I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.' Who can tell the effect 
that has been wrought by the simple fact that the Tabernacle pulpit has found 
the old Gospel all sufficient for man's salvation, and rich and full enough for 
thousands of sermons of rare beauty and power and richness." 

Rabbi De Sol. Mendes was next introduced. He began by thanking the 
audience for the privilege, in behalf of the Jews, of " interweaving a leaf of 
recognition in the silver chaplet this night so gloriously placed upon the brow 
of this distinguished laborer in God's best vineyard." He continued : " This 
is the first time I have ever spoken in a Christian church, and I must confess 
I am surprised that I do not feel myself more strange than I do. You are not 
ready to grasp the Jew's skirt yet, but I should think you would find it difficult 
to say a harsh thing, or do a hard one against the Jew, when you recollect the 
cousinly relationship which exists between us. And this I know, that under the 
leadership of this large-hearted, generous, and truthful servant of God, you have 
never been taught any but the tenderest 

SYMPATHY FOR. THE JEWS 

the most brotherly regard of the members of the Hebrew race. Therefore, all 
this sublime spectacle of the uprising of thousands to crown the quarter cen- 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 233 

tury mark of a noble career of public usefulness would have been somewhat 
incomplete had not a Jew been actively present. We Hebrews feel gratefuHy 
at home when it comes to honoring Dr. Talmage." 

The Rev. Dr. Louis Albert Banks, Pastor of Hanson Place Methodist 
Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, was introduced to speak for the Methodist Church. 
Dr. Banks said in part : 

" Over in the Oregon hills, where I spent my boyhood, on May afternoons 
like these we are now reveling in, the boys and girls on going home from the 
old log schoolhouse, to which many of us walked three or four miles every day, 
had a favorite custom of gathering wild flowers — lambs' tongues, and honey- 
suckle, and all those quaint, old-fashioned beauties of the country hillsides. 
And each bringing his share, someone who was skilful at it would weave a 
wreath which we placed on the head of the one who was elected chief for the 
evening of the school group. I am very glad, Mr. Chairman, of the oppor- 
tunity of bringing my little 

HANDFUL OF WILD FLOWERS 

from the Oregon hill-sides, where I first came to know and admire Dr. Tal- 
mage, and add them to the garland we are weaving for the head of the most 
widely known chieftain of the American pulpit — indeed, the most universally 
read of all preachers now living in the world. 

" I am glad to do this for several reasons. First, because Dr. Talmage has 
done more to revolutionize preaching in respect to its being made entertaining 
and interesting than any other man of the age. 

" It is equally true to say that no other minister of our time, or indeed of 
any time, has done so much to give consecrated individuality the right of way. 
Against the tendency to cut all ministers off the same piece of cloth, make them 
up in the same style, and hold them to a sort of sanctified dudeism, midway 
between a corpse-like bigotry and pious imbecility, Dr. Talmage has stood as a 
pulpit Gibraltar ; and thousands of young ministers, encouraged by his example 
and inspired by his independence, have been brave enough to be themselves, 
and live their own life, and do their own work in their own way. 

" Again, I am glad to give my word of thanksgiving for the 

GLORIOUS OPTIMISM 

that has always shone from this pulpit. During all these twenty-five years the 
Tabernacle pulpit has rung out with a bright and cheering faith in a God who, 
having made the world, was able to take care of it, and bring it at last to a suc- 
cessful issue. Though Dr. Talmage has preached much of the sins and the 
vices of the community, he has never failed to present a Christ mighty in love, 
and power, and sympathy, to save the lowest and the vilest, and bring them to 
spiritual health and saintship. 



234 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



" And yet, notwithstanding his intense individuality, and the marvelous 
personal success and triumphs which have come to him, Dr. Talmage has not 
preached himself from this pulpit, but his sermons have glowed with reverence 
and loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

" Again, we all have reason to thank Dr. Talmage for showing us how a 





WM. MCKINLEY 



GEN. T. SHERMAN 



man can go on year after year, doing an enormous amount of work of every 
sort, and still keep ever fresh and new as a May morning. And yet, after all, an 
interest in humanity, a faith in God, an enthusiasm for good causes — these are 
the things that make us immortal." 

The Rev. Dr. A. C. Dixon, speaking for the Baptist Church, declared that 
Dr. Talmage was the world's chief dispenser of Christian sunshine. He added: 

THE SECRET OF LIVING ON SUNSHINE 

" Among the first things I ever read from Dr. Talmage was his illustration 
of a child trying to eat sunshine with a spoon. He has learned the secret 
of living on sunshine and dealing it out to others. I suppose he has his ailments, 
his worries, and his troubles, but I have not heard of them. He keeps on the 
sunward side of every cloud, and therefore sees the rainbow. He prefers 
gazing at the stars to peering into the darkness. His is an optimism of 
faith, and hope, and charity." 

At the close of the meeting all eyes were upon Dr. Talmage as he rose 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 235 

to face the great multitude. He stood silent for a moment, his face giving 
evidence of deep agitation. Then, in a voice trembling with emotion, he said: 
" Dear Mr. Mayor, and friends before me, and friends behind me, and 
friends all around me, and friends hovering over me, and friends in this room, 
and the adjoining rooms, and friends indoors, and outdoors — forever pho- 
tographed upon my mind and heart is this scene of May 10, 1894. The lights, 
the flags, the decorations, the flowers, the music, the illumined faces will remain 
with me while earthly life lasts, and be a cause of thanksgiving after I have 
passed into the great beyond. Two feelings dominate me to-night — gratitude 
and unworthiness ; gratitude first to God, and next to all who have compli- 
mented me. 

HARD WORK BUT HAPPY YEARS 

" My twenty-five years in Brooklyn have been happy years. 
" Hard work of course. This is the fourth church in which I have preached 
since coming to Brooklyn, and how much of the difficult work of church building 
that implies you can appreciate. This church had its mother and its grand- 
mother and its great-grandmother. I could not tell the story of disasters with- 
out telling the story of heroes and heroines, and around me in all these years 
have stood men and women of whom the world was not worthy. But for the 
most part the twenty-five years have been to me a great happiness. With all 
good people here present the wonder is, although they may not express it, 

What will be the effect upon the pastor of this church of all this scene? ' Only 
one effect, I assure you, and that an inspiration for better work for God and 
humanity. And the question is already absorbing my entire nature, ' What can 
I do to repay Brooklyn for this great uprising?' Here is my hand and heart 
for a campaign of harder work for God and righteousness than I have ever yet 
accomplished. I have been told that sometimes in the Alps there are great 
avalanches called down by a shepherd's voice. The pure white snows pile up 
higher and higher like a great white throne, mountains of snow on mountains 

if snow, and all is so delicately and evenly poised that the touch of a hand 

>r the vibration of air caused by the human voice will send down the avalanche 
into the valleys with all encompassing and overwhelming power. Well, to-night 
think that the heavens above us are full of pure white blessings, mountains of 
lercy on mountains of mercy, and it will not take much to bring down the 

ivalanche of benediction, and so I put up my right hand to reach it, and lift 

ny voice to start it. And now let the avalanche of blessing come upon your 

>odies, your minds, your souls, your homes, your churches and your city. 

Slessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting, and let the 

diole earth be filled with his glory i Amen and amen ! " 

At the conclusion of Dr. Talmage's remarks and thank offerings, the 

aidience applauded most heartily and then further manifested their feelings of 

loving appreciation and endearment by singing 



236 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

"God be with you till we meet again." 

The services of the first day of celebration were concluded by the organist 
playing the march from " The Queen of Sheba," but it was not until after mid- 
night that the gathering dispersed, so delightful had been the entertainment, 
in correspondence with the warmth of their affectionate esteem for the uni- 
versally beloved pastor. 

THE SECOND DAY OF JUBILEE 

On the evening of May the eleventh, the second day of the great Jubilee, 
the demonstration took on not only a national, but an international character as 
well. The audience was led in prayer by the eloquent Dr. Mil burn, the aged 
Chaplain of the United States Senate. In the course of his prayer, referring to 
Dr. Talmage, he said: 

" Although his faith and that of his people has now and again been tried 
' so as by fire,' as silver is refined and gold purged, we bless Thee that in the 
midst of the fierce glare and heat of the flames, one like unto the Son of God 
hath been with them, and that the glory of this latter house is greater than 
was the glory of the former houses. We heartily bless Thee for the brave, 
manly, kindly truth, the sweet, wholesome, life-giving Christian truth, so steadily 
preached from this pulpit, whereby thousands have been converted from sin to 
righteousness, and thousands more confirmed in ways of well-doing and 
holiness." 

General Benjamin F. Tracy, former Secretary of the Navy, on taking the 
chair as the presiding officer of the evening, among other things said : 

TOUCHING THOSE WHO GUIDE 

"No minister of the Gospel in the world's history ever commanded in his 
lifetime so great an audience, and no stronger proof could be given that this 
man teaches what the world needs to hear, that he truly ministers to the souls 
of men. This is the secret of the influence which our friend has exerted, that in 
bearing his message he speaks a language that finds a response in every human 
heart. The breadth and depth and strength of that influence are attested by the 
warm and kindly greetings that we shall hear to-night from men of worth not 
only in this country, but throughout the world, men whose esteem and friend- 
ship are a valued possession to all who have been fortunate enough to win 
them. Many such men have come here to do him honor. Others, who could 
not come in person, take part in this celebration by sending their earnest con- 
gratulations. Among them are Senators of the United States, Governors of 
States, clergymen of distinction all over the world, the bishops of other 
churches and public men of foreign lands, and foremost among these last is 
that prominent statesman and scholar, only recently retired full of years and of 
honors. I mean the late Prime Minister of Great Britain, William E. Gladstone. 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 



237 



Upon such men has the influence of the teachings of Dr. Talmage made itself 
felt. It has been diffused over all lands and among all classes and conditions 
of humanity. It has reached the furthest boundaries of the civilized world. It 
has touched those who guide and direct the affairs of nations as well as the 
humblest citizen. Such an influence is a powerful instrument for good." 

The Hon. William M. Evarts, former Secretary of State, was next received 




1 ■ 



REV. A. C. DIXON 



IRA D. SAN KEY 



with demonstrations of cordial approval by the great audience of more than six 
thousand people who were crowded into the Tabernacle. Mr. Evarts, because 
of advanced age and enfeebled health, spoke briefly, but eloquently, of the 
influence of the Tabernacle pulpit, not only on Brooklyn, but on the whole 
nation. 

The South-land was next represented by United States Senator Walsh, of 
Georgia. In the course of an extended and eloquent address, Senator Walsh 
said: 

THE SOUTH HONORS HIM 

" When the South was prostrated by the desolation of war ; when her homes 
were destroyed, her lands and industries wasted ; when her sons and daughters 
were weeping for the loved and lost ; when despair wrung the hearts of her 
people, his voice was heard appealing to the victors for justice to the van- 
quished, and from that day to this he has preached the gospel of peace, 
fraternity, liberty and equality. His countrymen admire him for his splendid 
gifts. They admire him for the example of his noble life. We of the South 



238 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

honor him for his loving the sections into peace. His love of country is one 
of his strongest virtues. It is above party and above section/' 

Ex-Congressman Joseph C. Hendrix, of Brooklyn, next made a most epi- 
grammatic and witty address, saying among other things : 

" He draws his ilustrations from the great book of human experience. No 
one has ever questioned his orthodoxy. He has never sought to re-dress the 
old creed of his fathers. No one has needed a map or a guide-book to find out 
his theological views. They are as old-fashioned and as plain as a country 
road. He has never lost any time trying to refit his doctrines to the passing 
tastes of men. His pulpit work has been consistent. 

HIS SERMONS DO NOT QUARREL 

" His last sermon does not quarrel with his first. He hammers out the pure 
gold of the Gospel in his own way, and is always willing to give the elbow-room 
which he asks for himself. No one comes to his church for a Sunday morning 
nap. He keeps everybody awake. ' His sermons are never too long. Nobody 
goes away tired. He gives every one something to think about. He puts a 
little sunshine into every heart. He tries to do good in the world, tries earnestly 
and devotedly, and he succeeds." 

Following this address, the audience was aroused to great enthusiasm 
by the reading, by Dr. Louis Klopsch, of a number of telegrams and con- 
gratulatory letters from prominent persons in all parts of the globe. Among 
them were the following: 

Russian Cablegram from Count Andre Bobrinskoy, St. Petersburg, Russia. 

" Heartfelt congratulations from gratefully remembering friends.'' 

Letter from United States Senator John Sherman : 

" Your kind invitation in behalf of your committee that I attend the recep- 
tion to be tendered to Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, D.D., LL.D., on the com- 
pletion of the twenty-fifth year of his pastorate in Brooklyn, is received. There 
is no one for whom I would more cheerfully express my sincere regard and my 
hearty appreciation of his wonderful ability than Mr. Talmage. I have heard 
him and heard of him for so many years, and have read so many of his sermons 
that I hold him in my estimation as the greatest preacher of our time. All this 
and much more I could say for him if I were at liberty to attend, but I feel that 
my official duties here will not permit me to leave at a time when so many 
interests are involved in the legislation of Congress. 

Thanking you for your kind invitation, I am, 

Very truly yours, 

John Sherman." 

Letter from William Walter Phelps, ex-Minister to Germany, Hot Springs, 
Virginia : 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 



239 



" I shall not be well enough to accept the invitation, of which I would gladly 
avail myself, to testify that an acquaintance of a score of years, renewed at 
home and abroad, in public and private, has only increased my admiration for 
the amount of patriotic, social and religious work which that impetuous, un- 
selfish and gifted man, Dr. Talmage, has done." 

GOVERNOR McKINLEY'S TRIBUTE 

Then came a letter from one who was afterwards to be twice elected Presi- 
dent of the United States, to guide the country victoriously through a great 
war, and to join the trinity of the nation's martyred Presidents, but then plain 
Governor McKinley, of Ohio. He wrote as follows : 

" I felt honored by the invitation you have sent me to take part in the recep- 
tion to be tendered to the Rev. Dr. Talmage in celebration of the twenty-fifth 
year of his pastorate at the Brooklyn Tabernacle. While it is impossible for 
me to be present, I take occasion to give expression to the great respect and 
esteem in which I hold Dr. Talmage. The American people, irrespective of 
denominational differences, have a pride in the ability and public services of 
Dr. Talmage. His influence for good, in the direction of public sentiment, 
extends far beyond his own church and his own congregation ; it is felt all 
over our country, and even beyond the seas. Please convey to the Doctor my 
regards and congratulations. Very truly yours, Wiljjam McKinley." 





REV. LOUIS A. BANKS 



CHAPLAIN MILBURN, 
U. S. SENATE 



240 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

The Hon. Herbert Gladstone wrote for his father, saying: 

" Mr. Gladstone, being somewhat out of health, has to restrict his corre- 
spondence as much as possible, but he desires me to say for him that Dr. 
Talmage always has his best wishes, and that he remembers with much interest 
the occasions when he has had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Talmage." 

Cablegram from London : 

" Cordial congratulations ; grateful acknowledgment of splendid services in 
ministry during last twenty-five years. Warm wishes for future prosperity. 
Archdeacon of London, Professor Simpson, 

Canon Wilberforce, John Lobb, 

Thain Davidson, Bishop of London/' 

Letter from Earl of Aberdeen, Governor-General of Canada, Ottawa : 

" I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the twenty- 
third of April, inviting me to be present at the reception to be tendered to the 
Rev. Dr. Talmage, on the eleventh. 

" I regret that, owing to engagements here, I am compelled to decline the 
courteous invitation thus extended to me, but I beg to offer g^ood wishes in 
relation to this demonstration of esteem and good-will toward Dr. Talmage. 

Aberdeen." 

Letter from Rev. Joseph Parker of the London Tabernacle : 

" I have so often expressed my appreciation of Dr. Talmage that I feel it to 
be quite needless to add one word of eulogy, even in view of the impending 
celebration of his twenty-fifth pastoral anniversary. I have been asked to join 
others in sending a telegram of congratulation, but I do not wish to be one of a 
number in recognizing an event which is so intensely personal. In the realm 
of religious imagination, power, fertility, and ardor of fancy, Dr. Talmage 
stands in my esteem absolutely without a rival in the Christian pulpit of to-day. 
It is within my certain knowledge that not only is his ministry imaginatively 
and verbally splendid, but that it carries with it converting and elevating power. 
This is, of course, the highest tribute which can be paid to any ministry ; and I 
do nothing but the barest justice to a brother minister in thus solemnly and 
gratefully recording the fact. Association with Dr. Talmage is most dis- 
couraging to men of smaller capacity and feebler nerve. We can only stand 
back from him and each say, ' I, too, am a preacher.' I offer him my love, 
and confidence, and gratitude, on the occasion of his Silver Wedding with the 
church in Brooklyn. Joseph Parker. " 

The Governor of Michigan, Hon. John P. Rich, wrote : 

" While Dr. Talmage has been the pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle for the 
past twenty-five years, he has had the nation, and, to a large extent, the civilized 
world for an audience. " 

United States Senator James K. Jones wrote: 

" The results of his great labors will be felt to the last syllable of recorded 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 



241 




DR. TALMAGE SURROUNDED BY HARVEST DECORATIONS 
This Photograph, Never Before Printed, was Taken Before the Burning of the Last Tabernacle 

16 



242 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

time, and his name will be honored through all the future as it is loved by 
those who know him now." 

Bishop John F. Hurst, wrote : 

" The church in this and all other countries has been enriched by his labors. 
Many a life has become beautiful through his teachings. All classes have shared 
in the benefactions of his heart and hand.". 

After more than an hour spent in reading these congratulatory tributes, 
Rev. Charles L. Thompson spoke eloquently of Dr. Talmage's genius, work and 
influence, followed by Murat Halstead, as representative of the press, who, in 
turn, was succeeded by Rev. Dr. I. J. Lansing. At the conclusion of the latter's 
remarks General Tracy called for Dr. Talmage, who responded to the ovation 
tendered to him as follows : 

" Whether to address the presiding officer of this evening as one of the 
heroes of the United States army and call him General, or as recently a member 
of the Presidential Cabinet, who helped lift the navy from insignificance to a war 
armament that commands the respect of the world, and call him ex-Secretary ; or 
as one of the brilliant leaders in the American court-room, and call him attorney- 
at-law, I am undecided, and so will do neither, but address him as Mr. Chair- 
man. God bless you for your kindness in coming here to-night to preside over 
this audience. What in this scene has made the deepest impression upon the 
mind of this audience I do not know. The most vivid on my mind is an im- 
pression that has no reference to myself at all. We have been told that religion 
is a weak thing, fit for the weak mind, and an obsolete affair belonging to the 
ages of superstition. I point to the group of illustrious men on this platform 
to prove that the brain, the learning, the eloquence, the splendid manhood of 
America, is on the side of Jesus Christ. If religion had been a sham, these are 
the men who would have found it out. We have in this land, and on this 
platform the man who, after filling the office of Secretary of State of the United 
States, and belonging to two Presidential Cabinets, and pleading in the most 
important cases that ever came before judge or jury, stands now a combination 
of Edmund Burke and Daniel Webster — I mean William M. Evarts. We have 
been led to-night in prayer by the John Milton of the American pulpit. 

THE JOHN MILTON OF AMERICA 

like the one after whom I call him, his eyesight blasted by excess of vision, 
turning aside from the United States Senate to pray for us at the time when 
the Senate most needs his prayers. Georgia sends to us its distinguished citizen, 
the achievements of his great editorial pen now to be eclipsed by his mighty 
mission in the United States Senate. Henry W. Grady and Senator Colquit 
have passed away, but, thank God, we have in their place Hon. Patrick Walsh. 
On this platform we have a member of another branch of the National Legis- 
lature, but whether he is on the way to gubernatorial or presidential chair. I 



THE SILVER JUBILEE 



243 



know not ; but this I do know, he is our joy and our pride — Hon. Joseph C. Hen- 
drix. But the Committee of Reception does full honor to my own profession; 
and so they invited for this platform a minister of the Gospel, who, after 
rousing the cities of the West with his superb work, now stands in New York, 
Sabbath by Sabbath, telling the sweetest story that was ever told, as he only 
can tell it — Dr. Charles L. Thompson. Boston also must be heard from, and 
Boston is here in the pastor of the most historical pulpit in this city, the Park 
Congregational — my friend of many years, the Rev. Dr. Lansing. And there 
is here Murat Halstead, our great editor, and one of the grandest acquisitions 
Brooklyn has ever had. Oh, I forgot that this meeting somewhat refers to my- 







First Brooklyn tab£rnaci/£ 



self, and that makes me feel a little weaker than I ever felt before. A hundred 
thousand thanks. I suppose I may as well make it a million. 

" Dr. George W. Bethune, once a great preacher on Brooklyn Heights, 
was stopping over night at a Pennsylvania farmhouse. In the morning the 
Doctor sat at the breakfast table alone, for the good housewife felt that was the 
best way to honor him, and when the buckwheat cakes were put upon his 
plate, the good woman stood by him with the molasses cup to pour the sweet- 
ness on his cakes, and she said to him, ' How will you take this molasses on 
these cakes ? Will you take it crinkle-crankle or all in a puddle ? ' To-night 
to me the sweetness has come in the latter way — all in a puddle. 

"This is the supreme hour of my life. Many emotions stir my soul, but 
neither the Brooklyn city reception last night nor the national and international 



244 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



reception to-night, so far as I know my own heart, has created in me one 
feeling of exaltation or pride. It has only stirred in me a profound wish and 
prayer that I might hereafter prove myself worthy of all this kindness. Up 
till forty years of age a man may have ambition for himself, but for the most 
part after that it is ambition for his children ; and I shall hand over to my 
children in every form that I can preserve the memories of last night and to- 
night. I shall tell them never to forget the men who stood on this platform, 
and when the sons of these men come on the stage of action, to seek to cheer 
them as much as their fathers have cheered me." 

As Dr. Talmage ceased to speak there followed a remarkable scene. The 
entire audience, auditorium and galleries, rose at Dr. Talmage's request to 
honor the illustrious guests of the evening, and the air was a sea of waving 
handkerchiefs. Three times they waved and fluttered in token of three cheers, 
and then when the demonstration had subsided, the organ pealed forth the notes 
of " Auld Lang Syne," and the thousands with one voice joined in the strains. 
The benediction brought the Jubilee to a close, and ended the greatest and most 
successful anniversary occasion ever witnessed in any church in America, as a 
testimony of the popular love and appreciation of a pastor who had been very 
dear to countless thousands of Christian people in every country on the globe. 




SECOND BROOKLYN TABERNACXU 




"RED WINGS" 

THE DESTRUCTION OP THE EAST AND MOST BEAUTlEUE TABERNACEE — " A MYSTERY 
TO BE REVEALED ONLY IN ETERNITY " DR. TALMAGE' S DEADEY PERIL SYM- 
PATHY OF PRESS AND PUBLIC — THE PREACHER BEGINS HIS GLOBE-GIRDLING 
TOUR 

ARDLY had the last swelling, triumphant notes of the Jubilee Service 
died away, when the splendid Tabernacle, like its two predecessors, 
was blotted out of existence by a conflagration so sudden and totally 
unexpected, that not only the congregation but the entire city suffered 
from the shock of astonishment. 

" It is one of those mysteries that will never be revealed this side 
eternity. Our Church is gone ; but we will trust in God." 

These were the words spoken by Dr. Talmage, sitting in his own home in 
Oxford Street, Brooklyn, bowed down by the burden of the sudden disaster. 
His beloved Tabernacle, the pride of the city and the largest Protestant church 
in America, had been effaced, without a moment's warning. It mattered little 
to the devoted pastor that he had barely escaped with his own life. His 
church was gone — that beautiful temple of worship, which was known and 
loved to the ends of the earth — and the light of his life seemed for a time to 
be extinguished with it. 

HOW THE FIRE OCCURRED 
But great as was the disaster, still greater had been the mercy that pre- 
vented a worse calamity. Not a life had been lost, as far as was known. The 
fire occurred on Sunday, May 13, 1894, immediately after the close of the fore- 
noon service. The sermon had held the audience with more than usual interest, 
since it was the pastor's farewell before departing on his long journey around 
the globe. In his prayer, he had been especially fervent and touching, and 
had invoked the Divine protection and blessing on all who had participated 
in the great Jubilee Service of the preceding week. He had recalled all the 
kindnesses that had been shown toward the church on that occasion by other 
churches and their pastors, and his whole prayer was an outpouring of his 
heartfelt gratitude for himself and his flock. 

Dr. Talmage, at the conclusion of the service, had left the platform and 
was in the centre aisle, shaking hands with his people, as is his custom every 

240 



246 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Sunday. Almost all had passed out of the building, and the pastor, Mrs. Tal- 
mage, Assistant Pastor Oakes, and the officers of the church weie also pre- 
paring to leave, when a faint puff of smoke was observed at the bottom of 
the organ. Mrs. Talmage was standing in her pew, the centre of a little group 
of ladies, who w r ere on the point of leaving. The great Tabernacle was still 
en fete, the decorations of the Jubilee services not yet having been removed. 
The palms above the organ pipes waved and the air grew hotter, yet the glit- 
tering banners and rich velvet hangings flapped as though in a breeze. 

Some one called the attention of Mr. Dey, the sexton, to the smoke, and 
he at once set out to investigate. The entrance to the organ was through a 
room in the rear of the auditorium, and when the sexton, climbing up a ladder 
that stood there, pushed aside the scuttle over the interior of the organ, he 
saw through the thick smoke flames creeping around the pipes. Leaping 
back, he ran into the auditorium and gave the alarm. There were then only 
half a hundred persons in the church. Smoke began to pour out of the organ 
in dense volumes. 

DR. TALMAGE'S DEADLY PERIL 

Dr. Talmage heard the alarm and sanv the smoke, but did not seem for the 
instant to realize his peril. Airs. Talmage called out to him that the church was 
on fire, and those who stood by urged him to go, as the organ pipes were in 
imminent danger of falling. The pastor gazed upward toward the roof of his 
beloved Tabernacle, where the tongues of fire, shooting upward, had alreadv 
begun to lick the fretwork on the ceiling. He ran up the platform steps, 
entered his study and emerged a moment later with his hat and overcoat. 
The church was now nearly empty. He started for the door, but at that instant 
the great pipes of the organ, already half consumed by the flames, fell outward 
with a crash and into the auditorium. 

Another step, and the pastor of the Tabernacle would have been buried 
in the blazing mass. As it was, he quickly turned and hastened to the exit 
from the study. At the last moment he would have returned to the platform ; 
but friends conveyed him, safe and unhurt, but still dazed from his terrible 
experience, to the outer air on Greene Avenue. Others greeted him joyfully 
on the sidewalk, believing him to have perished in the church, which was now 
a roaring furnace of flame. 

MANY NARROW ESCAPES 

There were several other narrow escapes, but fortunately all were out of 
the doomed building before the fire and smoke filled the auditorium. Mr. 
Frederick W. Lawrence, Treasurer Thomas Pittblado, Trustee T. E. Mat- 
thews and others were among those who were exposed to serious peril, and 
their escape was providential. Mr. Lawrence crept out on hands and knees 




2 4 7 



248 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

to the open air, and Mr. Matthews and a few others were almost suffocated 
when they reached the street. 

Meanwhile, the fire had made tremendous headway and the interior of 
the great building was all ablaze. The beautiful decorations, hired for the 
occasion, valued at $15,000, were swept away in a moment; the organ was a 
wreck, and the woodwork of auditorium and galleries was all aflame. Flames 
shot through the roof in broad sheets, and the Flotel Regent, the finest in 
Brooklyn, was soon the prey of the fire. 

Vast crowds of spectators assembled in the streets, and the entire fire 
department of the city was summoned to the spot to fight the devouring 
element. But the efforts were unavailing. Soon the noble Tabernacle was a 
shapeless, blackened ruin, only the tottering and broken walls being left of the 
magnificent temple that had stood as a landmark for Christianity in America. 

The destruction was swift and complete. In less than an hour after the 
fire began, the interior of the great church, stripped of its glory, its rose- 
tinted cathedral windows, its carvings and gildings all lapped up by the flame, 
lay a charred and smoking mass of ruins. The third Brooklyn Tabernacle 
had met the fate of its two immediate predecessors. 

SPREAD OF THE CONFLAGRATION 

The flames had still other fuel to feed upon, for the Hotel Regent could 
not be saved. It was completely gutted and several dwellings nearby also 
suffered. A number of inmates of the hotel were rescued with difficulty. 
Sparks and blazing timbers filled the air for many blocks around. The Sum- 
merfield M. E. Church caught fire on the roof, and its trustees pluckily fought 
back the flames with a bucket brigade till the engines arrived. After a hard 
battle, the firemen were successful in preventing the destruction of further 
property. s 

At his home Dr. Talmage was the recipient of many condolences. Neigh- 
boring churches sent committees to tender the use of their pulpits ; tele- 
grams flowed in, and visitors came from all quarters. In the afternoon the 
Tabernacle Trustees met at the pastor's residence and Dr. Louis Klopsch 
submitted the following letter, which was adopted and tendered to the pastor : 

CONDOLING WITH THE PASTOR 

"Dear Dr. Taumage : With saddened hearts, but undismayed, and with 
faith in God unshaken and undisturbed, the trustees of the Brooklyn Taber- 
nacle have unanimously resolved to rebuild the Tabernacle. We find that, 
after paying the present indebtedness, there will be nothing left to begin with. 

" But if we can feel sure that our dear pastor will continue to break the 
bread of life to us and to the great multitudes that are accustomed to throng 
the Tabernacle, we are willing to undertake the work, firmly believing that w T e 



"RED WINGS" 249 

can safely count upon the blessing of God and the practical sympathy of all 
Christian people. 

" Will you kindly give us the encouragement of your promise to serve 
the Tabernacle as its pastor, if we will dedicate a new building free from debt, 
to the honor, the glory, and the service of God? 

" Trustees of the Tabernacle." 

DR.. TALMAGE'S REPLY 

On reading the letter Dr. Talmage replied : " Thank you, my brethren, 
thank you ! I have buried the dead, baptized the children, and married the young 
men and maidens of this people, and my heart is with them. I would rather 
serve them than any other people on the face of the earth. Under the con- 
ditions you name, I will remain the Tabernacle's pastor." 

Although the cause of the conflagration could not be ascertained, it was 
generally believed that it was produced by an electric spark from one of the 
wires that supplied the power necessary to run the organ. The wire probably 
rubbed against a reed, wearing off the insulation. Professor Browne, the 
organist, was seated at the instrument playing, until he was driven off by the 
smoke. There was considerable delay on the part of the fireman in responding 
to the alarm. 

SYMPATHY OF THE PRESS 

The press was full of expressions of sympathy for Dr. Talmage and his flock. 
The New York Commercial Advertiser said: 

" If every sigh of regret for the loss of Dr. Talmage's beautiful new church 
could be coined into a penny, they would replace the burned Tabernacle with 
an edifice as fine as St. Peter's in Rome." 

The New York Tribune had the following cheering words to the stricken 
pastor and people : " Dr. Talmage will have the sympathies of a host of well- 
wishers in his new reverse of fortune. The manifestations of hearty appre- 
ciation and respect which have been drawn out by his impressive anniversary 
meetings can hardly fail to encourage him to face with calm confidence the 
calamity which has overwhelmed him on the eve of his long vacation journey." 

The Brooklyn Standard Union, in a similar spirit, had these encouraging 
remarks : 

" Dr. Talmage goes on the journey he had planned for his recreation and 
education, the accumulation of the material the world affords, as stored energy 
in his brain to give to the world again ; not as if nothing had happened, but 
with a sharpened consciousness of duty and an augmented sense of devotion 
to his labors, and a spirit chastened, but not broken or bowed, but clearer and 
loftier in the conception of the breadth and glory of the work to be done." 



250 T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" The noble structure," said the Mail and Express, " so suddenly destroyed, 
was not only the home-altar of Dr. Talmage's immediate followers, but also 
the heart-shrine of that larger congregation of uncounted thousands who 
received his inspiring words from the wings of the press." 

THE FOURTH TABERNACLE 

The Tabernacle was the fourth church that Dr. Talmage occupied during 
his twenty-five years' ministry in Brooklyn, and the third in succession that 
was lost by fire. The first to fall before the flames was the Tabernacle in 
Schermerhorn Street near Third Avenue, which was built in 1870 of wood and 
iron. On Sunday morning, December 22, 1872, it was consumed by fire. 
Next, a larger church, capable of seating 5,000 persons, was erected in 1874, 
near the previous site. On Sunday morning, October 13, 1889, h a ^o fell a 
prey to the flames, having, as was believed, been struck by lightning during the 
night. The last Tabernacle was erected in 189 t, at a cost of $450,000, including 
the site. The organ cost $30,000, and was the finest instrument in the country. 
The windows were marvels of the stainer's art. The total loss on the Taber- 
nacle building was estimated at $300,000; loss on decorations, $15,000; unin- 
sured. The loss on the Regent Hotel was placed at $650,000; partially cov- 
ered by insurance, and the damage to other neighboring buildings aggregated 
$75,000, nearly all being insured. 

DR.. TALMAGE'S CHEERFUL MESSAGE 

Dr. Talmage, immediately after the fire, departed on his trip around the 
world, to return in October. Before leaving for the West, he wrote the fol- 
lowing communication to his friends and the friends of his ministry every- 
where : 

" Our church has again been halted by a sword of flame. The destruction 
of the first Brooklyn Tabernacle was a mystery. The destruction of the 
second a greater profound. This third calamity we adjourn to the Judgment 
Day for explanation. The home of a vast multitude of souls, it lias become 
a heap of ashes. Whether it will ever rise again is a prophecy we will not 
undertake. God rules and reigns and makes no mistake. He has his way 
with churches as with individuals. One thing is certain ; the pastor of Brooklyn 
Tabernacle will continue to preach as long as life and health last. We have no 
anxieties about a place to preach in. But woe is unto us if we preach not the 
Gospel ! We ask for the prayers of all good people for the pastor and people 
of Brooklyn Tabernacle. T. DsWiTT Tamage." 




A GOSPEL TOUR. OF THE GLOBE 

PREACHING TO GREAT AUDIENCES IN AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, CEYLON, INDIA, 
AND GREAT BRITAIN — THE WIDE WORLD'S WELCOME TO THE GREAT AMERI- 
CAN DIVINE 



T has fallen to the lot of few men to preach the Gospel under such widely 
different circumstances as it was the privilege of Dr. Talmage to do. 

After the destruction by fire of his third and most beautiful Taber- 
nacle (as has already been stated in a previous chapter of these 
memoirs) he decided to leave active pastoral duty at home for a time 
and make a preaching tour of the world. Crossing the continent, 
he embarked at San Francisco. When the steamer reached Hawaii, he 
was met by a delegation of distinguished people of Honolulu, and invited to 
preach that afternoon, and at three o'clock on a week day, with only suck 
informal notice as could be handed from lip to lip, the Congregational Church 
was packed to overflowing, with a multitude about one half native Hawaiians, 
and the other half people of many lands. 

" It was amazing to me," he wrote, " that with such a short notice of a few 
hours such a throng could be gathered. But the Honolulu papers have been 
publishing my sermons for years and it was really a gathering of old friends. 
An interpreter stood beside me in the pulpit and with marvelous ease translated 
what I said into the Hawaiian language. It was such a scene as I never before 
witnessed, and I shall never see it repeated. After shaking hands with thou- 
sands of people I went out in the most delicious atmosphere and sat down under 
the palm trees. What a bewitchment of scenery ! What heartiness of hospi- 
tality ! The Hawaiians have no superiors for geniality and kindness in all the 
world. In physical presence they are wondrous specimens of good health and 
stalwartness. One Hawaiian could wrestle down two of our nation." 

Hardly had Dr. Talmage stepped ashore, when the Chamberlain of Queen 
Liliuokalani requested him to call upon Her Majesty, and shortly afterwards 
Chief Justice A. F. Judd headed a delegation requesting him to preach. The 
morning was spent. in sightseeing and in visiting the noted precipice of Pali, 
where, some ninety-five years ago, King Kamehameha repulsed the armies of 

251 



25-2 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




Oahu, and drove a great host of 50,000 warriors over the rocks to their death. 

After lunch, in company with President Dole and the Chief Justice, Dr. 

Talmage was taken to the old palace of King Kalakaua, and he visited the other 

public buildings of the capital. He sat for a short 
time with the Provisional Council, which was then in 
session. Pie also visited the old Hawaiia-hoa church 
(the first stone church built there, some fifty years 
ago), the Kapiolani Park, the Kamehameha schools, 
etc. He was surprised and pleased at what he saw 
and regarded with evident astonishment the extent of 
the beautiful city, and more particularly the fine 
Christian spirit observed among the people. 

News of his arrival having spread rapidly, he was 
asked to speak in several public places, as many resi- 
dents of Honolulu wished to have the pleasure of 
hearing him, and to this he readily consented. About 
the same time, the Plawaiian Evangelical Association, 
composed of all the native ministers of the Polynesian 
Island, whose members were holding their quarterly 
meetings, conveyed a request to the Chief Justice, 
A. F. Judd, that Dr. Talmage should address them 
in the Congregational Church. It was therefore 
arranged, at three o'clock p. M. that he should give 
an informal talk. The people flocked into the church until the aisles, door- 
ways and even the steps were blocked. The church was never more crowded, 
and this in spite of the fact that the announcement of the meeting 
could only be made by blackboard, there being no time to make proper 
publication. However, it would seem that the whole city knew of it. 
The occasion was a remarkably pleasant and agreeable one for all who went 
there. Half the audience was composed of dark-skinned natives, the remainder 
being Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, English, and American. Such an audience 
probably no living creature ever before faced. Yet they were not strangers 
to Dr. Talmage, however, for his sermons had been published week after week 
in the Honolulu papers. He spoke for an hour in English, and the Rev. S. E~ 
Desha, of Hilo, interpreted in Hawaiian for the benefit of the audience, which 
alternately smiled, and cried, and applauded. After the benediction, there was 
a public reception. The people were enthusiastic in their praise for his kindness 
and masterly eloquence. Dr. Talmage was invited to visit the ex-queen by 
Mr. J. O. Carter, who had been his fellow-passenger from San Francisco. From 
the hour of his arrival in Hawaii until his departure for Samoa, Dr. Talmage 
did not seem to have a moment he could call his own. The unanimous sentiment 
in Honolulu was that the experience was a most pleasant and delightful one. 



A CEYLOXESE 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 



253 




254 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WTJRK 



In New Zealand and Australia, Dr. Talmage preached often, always to 
marvelous throngs and with remarkable effect. The following description given 
by his own pen telling of a Sabbath service at Adelaide, just before his leaving 

the great Island Continent, 
gives a glimpse of the kind 
of experience which met him 
everywhere. The Doctor 
said : 

" If my preaching services 
in Australia and New Zea- 
land are ever described, 
others, for the most part, 
will describe them. My Sab- 
bath at Melbourne was a 
type of all the Sabbaths. 
Passing along the great 
Town Hall, the largest audi- 
torium of the city — although 
the preaching service was 
not to begin until three 
o'clock in the afternoon — at 
ten o'clock in the morning I 
saw the audience gathering, 
ladies spreading their shawls 
on the stone steps to sit there 
until the doors were opened. When I approached the Town Hall, a little before 
three o'clock, I could make no progress through the streets except by the aid 
of the police, and it was a struggle every step of the way. Finding it impossible 
to get any further than the outside steps, I preached a short sermon there. By a 
reinforcement we finally got to the door and entered. The Moderator of the 
General Assembly, who was to have presided, did not get in at all. The service 
went on until nearly the close, when the mayor of the city came upon the 
platform to utter some words of thanks, and those who had charge of the doors 
opened them to let the people out, but the tide from without rushed in, and 
a panic would have taken place had not the organist begun to play the Doxology. 
This quieted everything. The mayor, however, had promised that I would 
preach again from the balcony, and so about a half hour afterward I spoke to 
the people still crowding the streets. And so it went on Sabbath after Sabbath, 
and I hope some good was done, but the Great Future will reveal. My own 
absorbing interest in the future welfare of this land," he wrote, " is easily under- 
stood when I tell you that all these colonies have been in my pastorate for many 
years. Deputations of ministers at every place we went, and people crowding 
to the windows at the railway stations, tell me that my sermons have been 




THS NATIONAL PALACE, HONOLULU 




255 



256 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



read in the cabins and the bushes and the mines as well as the villages and the 
cities. Enough encouragement have I received during this Australian journey 
to last me the rest of my life. After two months of hearty salutation, I stepped 
aboard the steamer at Adelaide, my last place of Australian visit, and begged 
the Southern and Indian Oceans to let me pass safely to what are called in the 
missionary hymn, ' Ceylon's isle ' and ' India's coral strand.' ' : 

One day in Ceylon, weary with sightseeing, and oppressed with the heathen 
temples on every side, Dr. Talmage was greatly delighted to come upon a 
missionary, who was standing on an elevation, preaching the Gospel to a crowd 




THE GOVERNMENT HOUSE AT HONOLULU 

of natives in the street. All was attention and silence and reverence. The 
Doctor's heart was filled with joy as he watched the interest of these poor 
people as they listened to the good news of salvation. It seemed to him as if 
he smelled the fragrance of the Rose of Sharon after walking among nettles. 
It was the morning light after a thick darkness. 

PREACHING THROUGH TWO INTERPRETERS 

Very soon the missionary, recognizing Dr. Talmage, turned to him, and 
asked him to preach to the people. With a heart full of joy, he began to 
speak the old message to this strange congregation. His address was rendered 






n 




17 



DR. TALMAGE ON ELEPHANT-BACK 



257 



258 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



into two languages by interpreters, first into Cingalese, and then into Tamil. 
Sentence by sentence, each sentence three times uttered. The preacher always 
remembered it as a " strange, weird and solemn occasion." 

Dr. Talmage has himself given a very interesting account of the preaching 
that night in Ceylon, following his first missionary sermon. He writes : 

" Going back to our hotel, we waited there until nearly eight o'clock, when 
we were taken to the preaching services to the old historical church, once the 
Reformed Dutch Church, when the Hollanders held Ceylon, but now a Pres- 
byterian Church, presided over by a minister from Scotland. The church was 




THE KING AND OUESN OF SAMOA 






A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 



259 



built in the year 1749, and is now, as then, a graceful and majestic structure; 
an imposing cruciform ; on its walls entablatures to the Dutch Governors who 
used there to worship, and until the time when the English took possession. 
The Dutch Governors are buried beneath the floor of this church. To my 
surprise, the great church was thronged, although our steamer did not arrive 
until ten o'clock that morning and the service was not announced until after 
twelve. How startled I was on opening the Psalm Book that night at the 
beginning of the service to find the words, ' Reformed Dutch Church ; ' for 
that was the name of the church in which I was baptized and received into 
membership, and ordained into the ministry. So they stand side by side : Church 
of Christ, and Temple of Buddha. Pillar of light, and colossus of gloom. The 
one proposing to cheer in this world and then give transportation to a world 
of radiant explanation, to go no more out forever, and the other a transforma- 




THE GREAT CRATER Otf KILAUEA 
The W T orld's Largest Volcano Visited by Dr. Talmage on his Round-the-World Tour 




26o 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 261 

tion from creature to creature, and a revolving wheel, and a passing on until 
personal existence is swallowed up as a drop of water is swallowed up of the 
sea — side by side those religions stand in Ceylon ; midnoon and midnight ! " 

PREACHING UNDER. A PUNKA 

In India, the English and American missionaries sought the privilege, both 
for themselves and for their people, of listening to the Gospel from his eloquent 
lips. Describing a service in Calcutta, he said : 

" I preached under a punka in this city, in a room where four punkas were 
going, and I kept cool. Why not have them in our American churches? City 
audiences then in July and August would be almost as large as in the month of 
May. The punka is not an Indian institution. The English introduced it. 
Formerly coolies with a small fan stood all night long over the sweltering 
European or American. Our winters in New York and London are well com- 
bated by steam pipe and furnace register, but we need the punka transported 
to battle the summers. Instead of being used only in our northern latitudes 
for the making of restaurants tolerable, it might be made a matter of national 
health and Christianization." 

Dr. Talmage took great interest in the work of the missionaries wherever 
he traveled, and delighted to give them good cheer by his sermons and his 
sympathetic brotherly kindness. He rejoiced in the success of their work, and 
wrote afterwards of his experience among them with the most loyal appreciation 
of their self-sacrificing labors. Speaking of his departure from Calcutta, he 
said: 

" Calcutta is the headquarters of Bishop Thoburn's work, and what Bishop 
Heber did hi his day Bishop Thoburn is now doing for the Gospelization of 
India. I saw some of his schools and preached to many of his people, and got 
facts in regard to what is being done here and throughout India by consecrated 
men and women, enough to thrill all Christendom with gladness. About twenty- 
rive thousand converts in India every year under the Methodist missions, and 
about twenty-five converts under Baptist missions, and at least seventy-five 
thousand converts under all the missions every year. But more than that, 
Christianity is undermining heathenism, and not a city, or town, or neighbor- 
hood of India but directly or indirectly feels the influence, and the day speeds 
on when Hinduism will go down with a crash. There are whole villages which 
have given up their gods, and where not an idol is left. The serfdom of woman- 
hood is being loosened, and the iron grip of caste is being relaxed. Human 
sacrifices have ceased, and the last spark of the last funeral pyre has been ex- 
tinguished, and the wheel of the Juggernaut has ceased to crush. 

" All India will be taken for Christ. If any one has any disheartenments let 
him keep them as his own private property — he is welcome to all of them. But 
if any man has any encouragements to utter, let him utter them. What we 




262 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 



263 



want is less croaking owls of the night, and more morning larks with spread 
wing, ready to meet the advancing day. Fold up now Naomi and Windham, 
and give us Ariel or Mt. Pisgah, or Coronation ! 

" Glad am I that the last thing I did in Calcutta was to preach that Gospel 
which is to save India, and to save the world. With what interest I looked over 
the pulpit into the dark faces of these natives, and saw them illumined with 





DR. TALMAGE PREACHING AT MANCHESTER 
In the English City Dr. Talmage Preached to a Most Enthusiastic Audience 



heavenly anticipation. While yet they were seated I took my departure for a 
railroad train. A swift carriage brought me to the station not more than half a 
minute before starting. I came nearer to missing the train than I hope any one 
of us will come to missing heaven." 



264 



T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AND WORK 



PREACHING IN ENGLAND 

On the way home he spent some time in the United Kingdom, where he 
preached in a large number of cities. 

" The preaching of the Gospel in Great Britain," he wrote, " was a tour 
I had for many years anticipated. With the themes of the Gospel I confronted 
more people than ever before in the same length of time — multitudes after 
multitudes, and beyond anything I can attempt to describe. From the day in 




DR. TALM AGS IN HYDE PARK, LONDON 
On One Occasion He Addressed a Vast Multitude, Estimated at from 10,000 to 15.000 People 



which I arrived at noon in Liverpool, and that night addressing two vast 
assemblages, until I got through my evangelistic journey, it was a scene of 
blessing. I missed but three engagements of all the summer, and those from 
being too tired to stand up. At all the assemblages large collections were 
taken, the money being given to local charities, feeble churches, orphan asy- 
lums or Young Men's Christian Associations, my services being entirely gra- 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 



265 



tuitous. But what a summer ! There must have been much praying here and 
elsewhere for my welfare, or no mortal could have gone through all I went 




DR. TAI,MAGE SPEAKING AT EDINBURGH 
In the Scottish Capital He Addressed a Vast Audience on Gospel Themes 



266 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

through. In every city and town I had messages poured into my ears for fam- 
ilies in America. It seems to me the Gospel is making mighty strides over 
there." 

He preached to large audiences in many other English cities, receiving, as 
he had done on previous occasions when visiting that country, a most enthu- 
siastic welcome. His sermons for many years had been read by multitudes 
in Great Britain and his name was a household word there. Of this particular 
visit he wrote : 

" May there come in England more cordiality between the National Church 
and the Dissenters. Although I would be called a Dissenter there, almost 
my first step in England was into a banqueting hall — the Lord Mayor's banquet, 
given to the bishops and high officials of the National Church — the great and 
good and genial Archbishop of Canterbury at their head, and a more magnificent 
group of folks, intellectually and spiritually, I never was amongst; and I found 
that though we had never met before, the Archbishop and myself were old 
friends. But, all up and down Great Britain, I found a multitude that no man 
can number enlisted for God and eternity, and I tell you the Kingdom is coming. 
If the pessimists would get out of the way, the world would soon see the salva- 
tion of God. Christianity is only another name for elevated optimism." 

That was the keynote of Dr. Talmage's Christianity throughout his whole 
life — cheerfulness ; looking at the bright side of things , trusting more implicitly 
in God's goodness and in the redeeming power of Christ. These were the 
essentials needed to bring the Kingdom. 

IN ROWLAND HILL'S PULPIT 

The last Sunday of his stay in London (on one of his English visits) he 
preached twice. In the morning he occupied the pulpit of Surrey Chapel, from 
which the eminent minister, Rowland Hill, once delivered his remarkable 
discourses. The building, although a very large one, was crowded to its utmost 
capacity, and as many persons had to be refused admission as succeeded in effect- 
ing an entrance. 

Dr. Talmage prefaced his morning sermon with the following observations : 
" With what joy I enter this church to-day I can hardly tell you. I was 
glad to accept the invitation to preach here ; first of all, because I should have an 
opportunity of speaking a word for my glorious Master. Then I thought I 
would come under the wing of the Primitive Methodist denomination, with 
182,000 members in England, and with Sabbath school scholars 365,000, making 
a church mighty now and mightier in the future — a church characterized all the 
world over for holy enthusiasm and for having given man a mighty stroke for 
God and the truth. Then I felt glad to come to a church in whose pulpit Rowland 
Hill had stood, and, after he had done his work so well, had after it laid down to 
rest. A glorious man of Christ! — even his eccentricities consecrated to God. 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 



267 



While some in this day speak chiefly of him in connection with mirthful and 
grotesque incident, those of us who have read his life and know his work look 
back to him as a man of great holiness of heart, purity of purpose and of life — 
all in the right direction. 

" Then I accepted the invitation with gladness, because I should have the 
honor of standing in the pulpit consecrated by the voice of James Sherman — his 
name a synonym of consecration to Christ — his name to go down through all the 
ages associated with everything that is good. Then I knew I should have the 




THE) GREAT ART GALLERY IN DRESDEN 



honor of standing in a pulpit where Newman Hall had so faithfully proclaimed 
Christ to the people — multitudes all over the world responding to the invitation 
of his ' Come to Jesus.' The beloved pastor of your church put into my hand the 
first sermon Rowland Hill delivered at the dedication of this church, printed at 
that time. In it he makes many allusions to his own ministry. In his preface 
he says many quaint and beautiful and stirring things, in regard to himself and 
the ministry, which had been assaulted on all sides, declaring his faith in God — 
that God who brought him off victorious over all his foes, and made his name 
honored in all Christendom, and to be honored in all the ages that are to come. 
In the opening sentences of that sermon Rowland Hill declares, ' I take it for 
granted the majority of my congregation believe in the immortality of the soul, 




268 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 



269 



and that the Bible is our only directory to a blessed eternity.' That is the key- 
note of my sermon this morning." 

In the evening Dr. Talmage preached in Agricultural Hall, London, to a vast 
and enthusiastic audience on " The Mission of Christ." 

The Young Men's Christian Association of Leeds, England, desired to make 
some expression of the high esteem in which Dr. Talmage was held by them, 
and to show their gratitude to him for the pecuniary benefits derived from his 
visit, entertained him at a public breakfast. The association needed a more com- 
modious building, and the profit from Dr. Talmage's lectures in England ( about 
$6,000, which the Y. M. C. A. received) was a material help to them in their 
effort. 

\Yhile in England, on one of his many preaching tours, Dr. Talmage visited 
Stratford-on-Avon and the grave of Shakespeare. 




CAPTAIN COOK'S MOXUMENT AT HAWAII 



270 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



" At eight o'clock one morning," he wrote, " we gathered in the parlor in the 
' Red Horse Hotel ' at Stratford-on-Avon. Two pictures of Washington Irving, 
the chair in which the father of American literature sat, and the table on which 
he wrote, immortalizing his visit to that hotel, adorn the room. From thence we 
sailed forth to see the clean, quaint village of Stratford. It was built just to have 
Shakespeare born in. We have not heard that there was any one else ever born 
there, before or since. If, by any strange possibility, it could be proved that the 
great dramatist was born anywhere else, it would ruin all the cab-drivers, guides 
and hostelries of the place. 




TOWN HALL ORGAN, FIFTH LARGEST IN THE WORLD, MELBOURNE 



" We went, of course, to the house where Shakespeare first appeared on the 
stage of life, and enacted the first act of his first play. A very plain house it is. 
Like the lark, which soars highest but builds its nest lowest, so with genius; it 
has humble beginnings. I think ten thousand dollars would be a large appraise- 
ment for all the houses where the great poets were born. But all the world 
comes to this lowly dwelling. Walter Scott was glad to scratch his name on the 
window, and you may see it now. Charles Dickens, Edmund Kean, Albert 
Smith, Mark Lemon and Tennyson, so very sparing of their autographs, have left 
their signatures on the wall. There are the jambs of the old fire-place where the 
poet warmed himself and combed wool, and began to think for all time. Here 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 271 

is the chair in which he sat while presiding at the club, forming habits of drink 
which killed him at the last, his own life ending in a tragedy as terrible as any he 
ever wrote. Exeunt wine-bibbers, topers, grog-shop keepers, Drayton, Ben 
Jonson, and William Shakespeare. Here also is the letter which Richard Quyney 
sent to Shakespeare, asking to borrow thirty pounds. I hope he did not lend it; 
for if he did, it was a dead loss. 

" We went to the church where the poet is buried. It dates back seven hun- 
dred years, but has been often restored. It has many pictures, and is the sleeping 
place of many distinguished dead ; but one tomb within the chancel absorbs all the 
attention of the stranger. For hundreds of years the world has looked upon the 
unadorned stone lying flat over the dust of William Shakespeare, and read the 
epitaph written by himself: 

' Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare 
To dig the dust enclosed here ; 
Bleste be ye man yt spares these stones, 
And curst be he that moves my bones.' 

" Under such anathema the body has slept securely. A sexton once looked 
in at the bones, but did not dare touch them, lest his ' quietus should be made 
with a bare bodkin.' 

" From the church door we mounted our carriage ; and crossing the Avon on 
a bridge which the Lord Mayor of London built four hundred years ago, we 
started on one of the most memorable rides of my life. The country looked fresh 
and luxuriant from recent rains. The close-trimmed hedges, the sleek cattle, 
the snug cottages, the straggling villages with their historic inns, the castle from 
whose park Shakespeare stole the deer, the gate called ' Shakespeare's stile,' 
curious in the fact that it looks like ordinary bars of fence, but as you attempt to 
climb over, the whole thing gives way, and lets you fall fiat, righting itself as soon 
as it is unburdened of you ; the rabbits darting along the hedges, undisturbed, 
because it is unlawful, save for licensed hunters, to shoot, and then not on private 
property; the perfect weather, the blue sky, the exhilarating breeze, the glorious 
elms and oaks by the way — make it a day that will live when most other days are 
dead. 

AT KENILWORTH CASTLE 

" At two o'clock we came in sight of Kenilworth Castle. Oh, this is the 
place to stir the blood. It is the king of ruins. Warwick is nothing, Melrose is 
nothing, compared with it. A thousand great facts look out through the broken 
windows. Earls and kings and queens sit along the shattered sides of the ban- 
queting-halls. The stairs are worn deep with the feet that have clambered them 
for eight hundred years. As a loving daughter arranges the dress of an old 
man, so every season throws a thick mantle of ivy over the mouldering wall. The 



2 7 2 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



roof that caught and echoed back the merriment of dead ages has perished. 
Time has struck his chisel into every inch of the structure. 

" By the payment of only three pence you find access to places where only the 
titled were once permitted to walk. You go in, and are overwhelmed with the 
thoughts of past glory and present decay. These halls were promenaded by 
Richard Cceur de Lion ; in this chapel burned the tomb lights over the grave of 
Geoffrey de Clinton ; in these dungeons kings groaned ; in these doorways 
duchesses fainted. Scene of gold and silver and scroll-work, and chiselled arch, 
and mosaic. Here were heard the carousals of the Round Table ; from those 
very stables the caparisoned horses came prancing out for the tournament ; 




ROYAL PALACE AT STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 



through that gateway strong, weak, heroic, mean, splendid Queen Elizabeth 
advanced to the castle, while the waters of the lake gleamed under torch-lights 
and the battlements were aflame with rockets ; and cornet, and hautboy and 
trumpet poured out their music on the air ; and goddesses glided out from the 
groves to meet her ; and from turret to foundation Kenilworth trembled under 
a cannonade, and for seventeen days, at a cost of five thousand dollars a day, 
the festival was kept. 

" Where is the glory now? What has become of the velvet? Who wears 
the jewels? Would Amy Robsart have longed to get into the castle had she 
known its coming ruin? Where are those who were waited on, and those who 



A GOSPEL TOUR OF THE GLOBE 273 

waited ? Cromwell's men dashed upon the scene ; they drained the lakes ; they 
befouled the banquet-hall ; the}' turned the castle into a tomb, on whose scarred 
and riven sides ambition and cruelty and lust may well read their doom. ' So 
let all thine enemies perish, O Lord; but let them that love thee be as the sun 
when he goeth forth in his might.' 

IN CARLYLE'S WORKSHOP 

" In Chelsea, a suburb of London, and on a narrow street, with not even 
a house in front, but, instead thereof, a long range of brick wall, is the house 
of Thomas Carlyle. You go through a narrow hall and turn to the left, and are 
in the literary workshop where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world 
have been forged. The two front windows have on them scant curtains of 
reddish calico, hung at the top of the lower sash, so as not to keep the sun from 
looking down, but to hinder the street from looking in. 

" The room has a lounge covered with the same material, and of construc- 
tion such as you would find in the plainest house among the mountains. It looks 
as if it had been made by an author not accustomed to saw or hammer, and in 
the interstices of mental work. On the wall are a few woodcuts in plain frames 
or pinned against the wall ; also a photograph of Mr. Carlyle, taken one day, 
as his family told me, when he had a violent toothache and could attend to 
nothing else. It is his favorite picture, though it gives him a face more than 
ordinarily severe and troubled. 

" In long shelves, unpainted and unsheltered by glass or door, is the library 
of the world-renowned thinker. The books are worn, as though he had bought 
them to read. Many of them are uncommon books, the titles of which I never 
saw before. American literature is almost ignored, while Germany monopolizes 
many of the spaces. I noticed the absence of theological works, save those of 
Thomas Chalmers, whose name and genius he well-nigh worships. The carpets 
are old and worn and faded — not because he cannot afford better, but because 
he would have his home a perpetual protest against the world's sham. It is a 
place not calculated to give inspiration to a writer." 



274 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




<\%\\ 



tmwM 



; fast 





CALLED TO WASHINGTON 

PASTOR OP THK ^CHURCH OF THE PRESIDENTS" — A NOTABLE OPENING SERMON — 

DR. TAIvMAGE'S HUGE DAILY MAIL HIS WASHINGTON HOME CALLS PROM 

MANY QUARTERS — RETIREMENT PROM THE WASHINGTON PASTORATE 



N the autumn of 1895 an enthusiastic and unanimous invitation was sent to 
Dr. Talmage from the First Presbyterian Church, of Washington, D. C, 
to become its pastor in conjunction with Dr. Byron Sunderland, who had 
ministered to it for the long period of forty-two years. Recognizing the 
wide field of usefulness such a position would open to him, Dr. Talmage 
accepted the call, and preached his first sermon there October 20, 1895. 
Dr. Sunderland had been a warm friend of Dr. Talmage for many years, and 
writing to him about the call, after assuring him that the call was endorsed by 
every member of the church, he added: " This entire town will rejoice when the 
papers announce your acceptance of our call. Not only our church has called 
you, but, so far as I can judge, the whole capital." 

THE CHURCH OF THE PRESIDENTS 

The church to which Dr. Talmage now went, and which was to be the last 
pastorate of his life, was an historic edifice. It had been organized nearly a 
hundred years. Its first home was a carpenter's shop which then stood in the 
grounds of the White House. After a time a frame building was hired for its ser- 
vices, and still later, as the numbers grew, the church was permitted to use the 
Supreme Court Room, in the basement of the Capitol. In 1812 the first church 
edifice was erected. It stood to the south of the Capitol, and was known as 
" The Little White Chapel under the Hill." Fifteen years later, the congregation 
had so far outgrown its accommodations that a new building was indispensable. 
A site was purchased on Four-and-a-Half Street, which at that time was the 
centre of the best residential quarter of the city, and a large church was erected. 
It served until i860, when it was enlarged ; and further improvements were made 
in 1892. At the time Dr. Talmage became one of the pastors of the church it 
was known as " The President's Church," from the fact that President Cleveland 
was one of its pew-holders and a regular attendant. Three other Presidents — 
Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Franklin Pierce — made it their church home, 

275 



276 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



while still others attended it occasionally. Many other famous men in political, 
diplomatic, and legal circles have from time to time made this church their 
home. Among the most distinguished of these are Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, 
Senator Benton, and William H. Seward. 

ALL HEAVEN LOOKING ON 

Dr. Talmage's first sermon in Washington attracted great attention, and after 
the church was thronged multitudes were turned away disappointed. The sermon 
was exceedingly appropriate to the occasion. It was from the text Hebrews 
12 :i : " Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses." 





DR. T. DE} WITT TALMAGE 



MRS. TALMAGE 



Dr. Talmage after reading his text and looking out over the great array of wel- 
coming and interested faces, among them many men and women distinguished in 
every walk of life, spoke as follows : 

" In this my opening sermon in the National Capital I give you heartiest 
Christian salutation. I bethink myself of the privilege of standing in this historic | 
church so long presided over by one of the most remarkable men of the century. 
There are plenty of good ministers besides Dr. Sunderland, but I do not know of | 
any man except himself with enough brain to have stood successfully and triumph- 
antly forty-three years in this conspicuous pulpit. Long distant be the year whenl 
that Gospel chieftain shall put down the silver trumpet with which he hasl 
marshalled the hosts of Israel, or sheath the sword with which he has struck suchj 
mighty blows for God and righteousness. I come to you with the same Gospel] 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 277 

that he has preached, and to join you in all kinds of work for making the world 
better, and I hope to see you all in your own homes and have you all come and 
see me, but don't all come at once; and without any preliminary discourses as to 
what I propose to do, I begin here and now to cheer you with the thought that 
all heaven is sympathetically looking on. ' Seeing we also are compassed about 
with so great a cloud of witnesses.' 

CROSSING THE ALPS 

" Crossing the Alps by the Monte Cenis Pass, or through the Mont Cenis 
Tunnel, you are in a few hours set down at Verona, Italy, and in a few minutes 
begin examining one of the grandest ruins of the world — the Amphitheatre. The 
whole building sweeps around you in a circle. You stand in the arena, where 
the combat was once fought, or the race run, and on all sides the seats rise, tier 
above tier, until you count forty elevations, or galleries, as I shall see fit to call 
them, in which sat the senators, the kings, and the twenty-five thousand excited 
spectators. At the sides of the arena, and under the galleries, are the cages in 
which the lions and tigers are kept without food, until frenzied with hunger and 
thirst, they are let out upon some poor victim, who, with his sword and alone, 
is condemned to meet them. I think that Paul himself once stood in such a place, 
and that it was not figuratively, but literally, that he had ' fought with beasts at 
Ephesus.' 

THE GALA-DAY 

" The gala-day has come. From all the world the people are pouring into 
Verona. Men, women, and children, orators and senators, great men and small, 
thousands upon thousands come, until the first gallery is full, and the second, 
the third, the fourth, the fifth — all the way up to trie twentieth, all the way up 
to the thirtieth, all the way up to the fortieth. Every place is filled. Immensity 
of audience sweeping the great circle. Silence ! The time for the contest has 
come. A Roman official leads forth the victim into the arena. Let him get his 
sword, with firm grip, into his right hand. The twenty-five thousand sit breath- 
lesslv watching. I hear the door at the side of the arena creak open. Out 
plunges the half-starved lion, his tongue athirst for blood, and, with a roar that 
brings all the galleries to their feet, he rushes against the sword of the combatant. 
Do you know how strong a stroke a man will strike when his life depends upon 
the first thrust of his blade? The wild beast, lame and bleeding, slinks back 
toward the side of the arena; then, rallying his wasting strength, he comes up 
with fiercer eye and more terrible roar than ever, only to be driven back with a 
fatal wound, while the combatant comes in with stroke after stroke, until the 
monster is dead at his feet, and the tweny-five thousand people clap their hands, 
and utter a shout that makes the city tremble. 

" Sometimes the audience came to see a race ; sometimes to see gladiators fight 
each other, until the people, compassionate for the fallen, turned their thumbs up 



278 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

as an appeal that the vanquished be spared ; and sometimes the combat was with 
wild beasts. 

" To an amphitheatrical audience Paul refers when he says : ' We are com- 
passed about with so great a crowd of witnesses.' 

" The fact is, that every Christian man has a lion to fight. Yours is a bad 
temper. The gates of the arena have been opened, and this tiger has come out 
to destroy your soul. It has lacerated you with many a wound. You have been 
thrown by it time and again, but in the strength of God you have arisen to drive 
it back. I verily believe you will conquer. I think that the temptation is getting 
weaker and weaker. You have given it so many wounds that the prospect is 
that it will die, and you shall be victor, through Christ. Courage, brother ! Do 
not let the sands of the arena drink the blood of your soul ! 

THE LION OF STRONG DRINK 

" Your lion is the passion for strong drink. You may have contended 
against it twenty years ; but it is strong of body and thirsty of tongue. You 
have tried to fight it back with broken bottle or empty wine flask. Nay ! That 
is not the weapon. With one horrible roar he will seize thee by the throat and 
rend thee limb from limb. Take this weapon, sharp and keen — reach up and get 
it from God's armory ; the Sword of the Spirit. With that thou mayst drive him 
back and conquer ! 

" But why specify, every man and woman has a lion to fight. If there be 
one here who has no besetting sin, let him speak out, for him have I offended. 
If you have not fought the lion, it is because you have let the lion eat you up. This 
very moment the contest goes on. The Trojan celebration, where ten thousand 
gladiators fought, and eleven thousand wild beasts were slain, was not so terrific 
a struggle as that which at this moment goes on in many a soul. That combat 
was for the life of the body; this is for the life of the soul. That was with wild 
beasts from the jungle; this is with the roaring lion of hell. 

WE DO NOT FIGHT ALONE 

" Men think, when they contend against an evil habit, that they have to fight it 
all alone . No ! they stand in the centre of an immense circle of sympathy. Paul 
had been reciting the names of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, 
Joseph, Gideon, and Barak, and then says : ' Being compassed about with so great 
a cloud of witnesses.' 

'' You fight in an arena around which circle, in galleries above each other, all 
the kindling eyes and all the sympathetic hearts of the ages ; and at every victory 
gained there comes down the thundering applause of a great multitude that no 
man can number. ' Being compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses/ 
On the first elevation of the ancient amphitheatre, on the day of a celebration, sat 
Tiberius, or Augustus, or the reigning king. So, in the great arena of spectators 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 279 

that watch our struggles, and in the first divine gallery, as I shall call it, sits our 
King, one Jesus. On his head are many crowns ! The Roman Emperor got his 
place by cold-blooded conquests ; but our King hath come to his place by the 
broken hearts healed, and the tears wiped away, and the souls redeemed. The 
Roman Emperor sat with folded arms, indifferent as to whether the swordsman 
or the lion beat ; but our King's sympathies are all with us. Nay, unheard of con- 
descension ! I see him come down from the gallery into the arena to help us in the 
fight, shouting, until all up and down his voice is heard : ' Fear not ! I will help 
thee ! I will strengthen thee by the right hand of my power ! ' 

" They gave to the men in the arena, in the olden time, food to thicken their 
blood, so that it would flow slowly, and that for a longer time the people might 
gloat over the scene. But our King has no pleasure in our wounds, for we are 
bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. 

' In all the anguish of our heart, 
The Man of Sorrows bore a part.' 

" Once in the ancient amphitheatre, a lion with one paw caught the com- 
batant's sword, and with his other paw caught his shield. The man took his 
knife from his girdle and slew the beast. The king, sitting in the gallery, said, 
' That was not fair ; the lion must be slain by a sword.' Other lions were turned 
out, and the poor victim fell. You cry, ' Shame ! Shame ! ' at such meanness. 
But the King, in this case, is our brother, and he will see that we have fair play. 
He will forbid the rushing out of more lions than we can meet ; he will not 
suffer us to be tempted above that we are able. Thank God ! the King is in the 
gallery ! His eyes are on us. His heart is with us. His hand will deliver us. 
' Blessed are all they who put their trust in Him ! ' 

ANGELS IN THE GALLERY 

" I look again and see the angelic gallery. There they are : The angel that 
swung the sword at the gate of Eden, the same that Ezekiel saw upholding the 
throne of God, and from which I look away, for the splendor is insufferable. 
Here are the guardian angels. That one watched a patriarch ; this one protected 
a child. That one has been pulling a soul out of temptation ! All these are 
messengers of light ! Those drove the Spanish Armada on the rocks ; this 
turned Sennacherib's living hosts into a heap of one hundred and eighty-five 
thousand corpses. Those, yonder, chanted the Christmas carol over Bethlehem, 
until the chant awoke the shepherds. These, at Creation, stood in the balcony 
of Heaven, serenaded the new-born world, wrapt in swaddling clothes of light. 
And there, holier and mightier than all, is Michael, the Archangel. To command 
an earthly host gives dignity; but this one is leader of the twenty thousand 
chariots of God, and of the ten thousand times ten thousand angels. I think 



280 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

God gives command to the Archangel, and the Archangel to the Seraphim, and 
the Seraphim to the Cherubim, until all the lower orders of Heaven/ hear the 
command, and go forth on the high behest. 

FRIENDS IN THE GALLERY 

" Now bring on your lions ! We can fear ? All the spectators in the angelic 
gallery are our friends. ' He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee 
in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot 
against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder ; the young lion and the 
dragon shalt thou trample under foot.' Though the arena be crowded with tempt- 
ations, we shall, with the angelic help, strike them down in the name of our God, 
and leap on their fallen carcasses ! Oh, bending throng of bright, angelic faces, 
and swift wings, and lightning foot ! I hail you to-day, from the dust and 
struggle of the arena ! 

" I look again. I see the gallery of the prophets and apostles. Who are 
those mighty ones up yonder? Hosea, and Jeremiah, and Daniel, and Isaiah, 
and Paul, and Peter, and John, and James. There sits Noah, waiting for all the 
world to come into the Ark; and Moses, waiting till at last the Red Sea shall 
divide ; and Jeremiah, waiting lor the Jews to return ; and John, of the 
Apocalypse, waiting for the swearing of the angel that Time shall be no longer. 
Glorious spirits ! Ye were howled at ; ye were stoned ; ye were spit upon ! 
They have been in the fight themselves ; and they are all with us. Daniel knows 
all about lions. Paul fought with beasts at Ephesus. 

THE SHOUT FROM THE GALLERIES 

" In the ancient amphitheatre the people got so excited that they would 
shout from the galleries to the men in the arena : ' At it again ! ' ' Forward ! ' 
' One more stroke ! ' ' Look out ! ' ' Fall back ! ' ' Huzza ! Huzza ! ' So in 
that gallery, prophetic and apostolic, they cannot keep their peace. Daniel cries 
out : ' Thy God will deliver thee from the mouth of the lions ! ' David exclaims : 
' He will not suffer thy foot to be moved ! ' Isaiah calls out : ' Fear not ! I am 
with thee ! Be not dismayed ! ' Paul exclaims : * Victory through our Lord Jesus 
Christ !' That throng of prophets and apostles cannot keep still. They make 
the welkin ring with shouting and hallelujahs. 

" I look again and I see the gallery of the martyrs. Who is that? Hugh 
Latimer, sure enough ! He would not apologize for the truth preached ; and so 
he died, the night before swinging from the bedpost in perfect glee at the thought 
of emancipation. Who were that army of six thousand six hundred and sixty- 
six ? They are the Theban legion who died for the faith. Here is a larger host 
in magnificent array — eight hundred and eighty-four thousand — who perished for 
Christ in the persecutions of Diocletian. 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 281 

A FAMILY GROUP 

" Yonder is a family group, Felicitas, of Rome, and her children. While 
they were dying for the faith she stood encouraging them. One was whipped to 
death by thorns ; another was flung from a rock ; another was beheaded. At last 
the mother became a martyr. There they are, together — a family group in 
Heaven ! Yonder is John Bradford, who said, in the fire, ' We shall have a merry 
supper with the Lord to-night ! ' Yonder is Henry Voes, who exclaimed, as he 
died, ' If I had ten heads they should fall off for Christ ! ' The great throng of 
to their hands, and other horses to their feet, and thus they were pulled apart ; 
the martyrs ! They had hot lead poured down their throats ; horses were fastened 
they had their tongues pulled out by red hot pinchers ; they were sown up in the 
skins of animals, and then thrown to the dogs ; they were daubed with combus- 
tibles and set on fire ! If all the martyrs' stakes that have been kindled could be 
set at proper distances, they would make the midnight all the world over bright 
as noon-day! And now they sit yonder in the martyrs' gallery. For them the 
fires of persecution have gone out. The swords are sheathed and the mob hushed. 
Now they watch us with an all-observing sympathy. They know all the pain, all 
the hardships, all the anguish, all the injustice, all the privation. They cannot 
keep still. They cry : ' Courage ! The fire will not consume. The floods cannot 
drown. The lions cannot devour ! Courage, down there in the arena ! ' What, 
are they all looking? This night we answer back the salutation they give, and 
cry, * Hail, sons and daughters of the fire ! ' 

A GALLERY OF EMINENT CHRISTIANS 

" I look again, and I see another gallery, that of eminent Christians. What 
strikes me strangely is the mixing in companionship of those who on earth could 
not agree. There I see Martin Luther, and beside him a Roman Catholic who 
looked beyond the superstitions of his church and is saved. There is Albert 
Barnes, and around him the Presbytery who tried him for heterodoxy ! Yonder 
is Lyman Beecher, and the church court that denounced him ! Stranger than all, 
there is John Calvin and James Arminius! Who would have thought that they 
would sit so lovingly together ? There is George Whitefield, and the bishops, who 
would not let him come into their pulpit because they thought him a fanatic. 
There are the sweet singers, Toplady, Montgomery, Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, 
and Mrs. Sigourney. If Heaven had had no music before they went up they 
would have started the singing. And there the band of missionaries: David 
Abeel, talking of China redeemed ; and John Scudder, of India saved ; and David 
Brainard, of the Aborigines evangelized; and Mrs. Adoniram Judson, whose 
prayers for Burmah took heaven by violence! All these Christians are looking 
into the arena. Our struggle is nothing to theirs. Do we, in Christ's cause, suffer 
from the cold ? They walked Greenland's icy mountains. Do we suffer from the 



282 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

heat? They sweltered in the tropics. Do we get fatigued? They fainted, with 
no one to care for them but cannibals. Are we persecuted? They were 
anathematized. 

LOOKING FROM THEIR. GALLERY 

" And as they look from their gallery and see us falter in the presence of the 
lions, I seem to hear Isaac Watts addressing us in his old hymn, only a little 
changed : 

* Must you be carried to the skies 
On flowery beds of ease, 
While others fought to win the prize, 
Or sailed through bloody seas ? ' 

Toplady shouts, in his old hymn : 

' Your harps, ye trembling saints, 
Down from the willows take. 
Loud to the praise of love divine, 
Bid every string awake.' 

While Charles Wesley, the Methodist, breaks forth in his favorite words, a 
little varied: 

' A charge to keep you have, 
A God to glorify ; 
A never-dying soul to save, 
And fit it for the sky ! ' 

" I look again, and I see the gallery of our departed. Many of those in the 
other galleries we have heard of ; but these we knew. Oh ! how familiar their 
faces ! They sat at our table, and we walked to the house of God in company. 
Have they forgotten us? Those fathers and mothers started us on the road of 
life. Are they careless as to what becomes of us ? And those children. Do they 
look on with stolid indifference as to whether we win or lose this battle for 
eternity? Nay; I see that child running his hand over your brow and saying. 
' Father, do not fret ;' ' Mother do not worry/ They remember the day they left 
us. They remember the agony of the last farewell. Though years in heaven, 
they know our faces. They remember our sorrows. They speak our names. 
They watch this fight for heaven. Nay; I see them rise up and lean over, and 
wave before us their recognition and encouragement. That gallery is not full. 
They are keeping places for us. After we have slain the lion, they expect the 
King to call us, saying, ' Come up higher ! ' Between the hot struggles in the 
arena I wipe the sweat from my brow and stand on tiptoe, reaching up my right 
hand to clasp theirs in rapturous hand-shaking, while their voices come ringing 
down from the gallery, crying, * Be thou faithful unto death, and you shall have 
a crown ! ' 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 



283 





■• 






THE FIRST PRESRYTERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C. 
The Last Church of Which Dr. Talmage was Pastor 



284 T. DE WITT TAUIAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

A JOYOUS SCENE 

"But I pause, overwhelmed with the majesty and the joy of the scene! 
Gallery of the King ! Gallery of angels ! Gallery of prophets and apostles. 
Gallery of martyrs ! Gallery of saints ! Gallery of friends and kindred ! Oh, 
majestic circles of light and love! Throngs! Throngs! Throngs! How shall we 
stand the gaze of the universe ? Myriads of eyes beaming on us ! Myriads of 
hearts beating in sympathy for us ! How shall we ever dare to sin again ? How 
shall we ever become discouraged again? How shall we ever feel lonely again? 
With God for us, and angels for us, and prophets and apostles for us, and the 
great souls of the ages for us, and our glorified kindred for us — shall we give 
up the fight and die ? No ! Son of God, who didst die to save us. No ' ye angels, 
whose wings are spread forth to shelter us. No ! ye prophets and apostles, 
whose warnings startle us. No ! ye loved ones, whose arms are outstretched to 
receive us. No ! We will never surrender ! 

1 Sure I must fight if I would reign — 
Be faithful to my Lord 
And bear the Cross, endure the pain, 
Supported by Thy Word. 

* Thy saints in all this glorious war 

Shall conquer, though they die; 
They see the triumph from afar, 
And seize it with their eye. 

* When that illustrious day shall rise, 

And all thine armies shine 
In robes of victory through the skies, 
The glory shall be thine.' 

" My friends ! shall we die in the arena or rise to join our friends in the 
gallery? Through Christ we may come off more than conquerors. A soldier, 
dying in the hospital, rose up in bed the last moment and cried, ' Here ! Here ! ' 
His attendants put him back on his pillow and asked him why he shouted, ' Here ! ' 
' Oh ! I heard the roll-call of Heaven, and I was only answering to my name ! ' 
I wonder whether, after this battle of life is over, our names will be called in the 
muster-roll of the pardoned and glorified, and with the joy of heaven breaking 
upon our souls, we shall cry, ' Here ! Here ! ' " 

AN IDEAL HOME 

Dr. Talmage's home, at No. 1400 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, was 
a handsome four-story building, modern in style. Here, in the centre of national 
influence and culture, the great preacher dispensed his hospitality to guests who 
visited him from all parts of the world. His study was on ideal snuggery, lined 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 285 

with well-filled bookshelves and big, inviting, leather-covered chairs and settees. 
Books and periodicals were everywhere. Nearby was a famous collection of 
relics from Eastern lands — trophies of many journeys — rocks from Sinai, pebbles 
from the brook Elah (whence David took the stones with which he slew Goliath), 
relics from the Acropolis, from the Parthenon, from Mars' Hill, where Paul 
preached to the Athenians ; from Sinai, Jerusalem, Olivet, and even from Calvary. 

A MEMORABLE MINISTRY 

Among Dr. Talmage's Washington parishioners were President Cleveland, 
many Cabinet members and other high officials. He was the most popular minister 
at the national capital, and his church was crowded to the doors ; but urgent calls 
from other quarters were multiplying, and he finally decided, though not without 
reluctance, to give up local pastoral work, and devote himself exclusively to 
answering these demands. He retired from active connection with the Wash- 
ington church in 1900, and thereafter gave himself up wholly to editorial work 
and preaching and lecturing. The passing years served to increase his fame, and 
the announcement of his preaching was always sufficient to attract a vast audience. 
His personal mail was probably the largest of any man in America outside of 
public office. There were thousands who wrote to him, asking advice in spiritual 
things, and laying their hearts bare to one whom - they regarded as bearing a 
divine mission, and " speaking with authority." 

RESIGNING TO PRESBYTERY 

An important meeting of the Washington Presbytery was held in the Gunton 
Temple Memorial Church, early in April, 1899, at which Dr. Talmage formally 
tendered his resignation as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. He spoke 
as follows : 

" After a delightful pastorate in the First Presbyterian Church of this city, I 
now ask for the dissolution of the pastoral relation. For a long while I have 
felt called to a more general work than a fixed pastorate allows, but I have not 
before now seen the way clear to undertake it. The demands of religious jour- 
nalism upon me have greatly increased, and my opportunities for religious service 
in other directions have been greatly multiplied. I do not propose to stop preach- 
ing, but if the Lord permits, I will preach more than I ever have preached. After 
a few more weeks of comparative rest from absorbing work, I hope to be very busy. 

" In closing my service in the First Presbyterian Church, I wish to express 
the delight I have had in Gospel work, and in friendships that will last for time and 
eternity. I have had full and unhindered way of declaring the whole counsel of 
God, and what a joy it has been to me to offer the mercy and comfort of the 
Gospel Sabbath by Sabbath to the people ! It has been to me a great satisfaction 
that I have been upheld by the unanimous support of the official Boards of the 
Church, and they have reinforced me in everything I have proposed. 



286 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" Meanwhile the acquaintanceship I have formed with the members of 
churches of all denominations is something for which I thank God and thank 
them. It will be a matter of rejoicing to me forever that I pitched my tent in 
this glorious capital. 

A WOUD OF PARTING 

" I desire to retain membership in this Presbytery, and I will not allow this 
occasion to pass without saying that though I have belonged to various ecclesiasti- 
cal bodies, in none of them have I found a more consecrated and genial brother- 
hood than in this Presbytery, and I pray the blessing of God upon these brethren 
and the people of their charge, and I hope we may often meet in fields of Christian 
usefulness, and when our work is done meet in the great harvest home when the 
sheaves come in, and ' the reapers are the angels.' When we see ' the King in his 
beauty ' we will realize how very poor was our best earthly service." 

A GREAT LIFE WOUK 

At the conclusion of his remarks, which were received with much feeling by 
those present, brief addresses were delivered by Mr. T. F. Sargent and Mr. C. 
E. DuBois, elders of the church. In the course of his remarks, Mr. C. L. DuBois 
said: 

" Dr. Talmage's great life-work and its results need no eulogium from me. 
They are written in the lives of thousands of Christian men and women who 
have been led to Christ by his eloquent pleadings and remarkable presentment of 
the truths of the Gospel. 

" His work in our church has had beneficent results. Whenever in this city 
he came to the mid-week meetings, and by his encouraging and inspiring presence, 
as Dr. Sunderland once remarked after prayer-meeting, ' lifted up the whole meet- 
ing and put new life into it.' His impressive way of conducting the communion 
services made every occasion of this kind a memorable one and thrilled every one 
present with a new fervor for the great cause. 

SOME PASTORAL RESULTS 

" In alluding to results attending his pastorate here it must be borne in mind 
that the great throngs which packed our church to the doors at every sermon, 
were in most part from the outside ; strangers or visitors from other churches, so 
that the seed sown in their hearts may have borne fruit in distant lands and in sister 
churches in this city. As for the immediate effect upon our own church member- 
ship, it is sufficient for me to point to the fact that at our annual meeting this 
year, our stated clerk, Mr. Dalrymple, in announcing the number on the church 
roll of membership, said it was the highest figure ever reached since his connection 
with the church, extending back some twenty years. 

" It is with profound sorrow that we take leave of him — he who has made his 
home with us for four years, and we feel that we have been singularly blessed in 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 287 

having for a spiritual guide one who has made so many thousands happy by his 
teachings. We are, however, grateful to a kind Providence that ours have been 
the altar-fires he has caused to flame with such brightness by his presence, and 
thankful that he is still with us and, as we understand, will be a member of our 
Presbytery for a long time to come. 

" The old First Church bids its retiring pastor God-speed, and with a grateful 
appreciation of his wondrous work and achievements for Christ it proffers to him 
its warmest wishes for a long life of usefulness and the richest blessings that 
heaven can grant." 

Several other addresses were made, all speaking in highest terms of praise 
of the retiring pastor's work in Washington and throughout the country. Rev. 
Thomas Chalmers Easton, of Washington, said: 

" It may not be known to many that when Dr. Talmage came to this city, 
there were invitations from all parts of the world to have the privilege and honor 
of his precious ministrations. Melbourne, Australia; Toronto, Canada; San 
Francisco, Cal. ; Louisville, Ky. ; Chicago, 111. ; New York City ; Brooklyn, N. Y. ; 
London, the great metropolis of the British Empire, pledged him that a much 
larger and finer edifice than Spurgeon's Tabernacle would be erected for him. 

" All these cities promised to erect more spacious places of worship than the 
Brooklyn Tabernacle, if he came to them. But these were all waved aside, 
and he came to the First Church during a peculiar crisis, and for four years has 
given to it his best efforts. 

" But the pain of this action in his retiring from the First Church is miti- 
gated by the fact that he leaves this narrow circle for a far wider area of Chris- 
tian work, and where his consecrated pen will be used more effectively than ever 
in religious journalism. His attentions are to be given more fully to The Christian 
Herald, of which he is the editor — that marvelous religious paper, which stands 
unexcelled by any other product from the press of America. Its circulation is 
unparalleled among the religious press. At the close of last year it issued over a 
million free copies as samples of the brilliant genius, the matchless poetic fervor, 
the thrilling pathos and relentless logic of this great Master in Israel. 

" Wherever the English tongue is spoken or read,, through all Christendom, 
his sermons are read as no other pulpit productions are read. In the Imperial 
Palace of Russia ; Queen Olga, in the Royal Palace at Athens, Greece, and Queen 
Victoria, in her Highland home at Balmoral, Scotland — all delight in his brilliant 
discourses. Although he now leaves the First Church, he will still remain with 
us as a Presbyterian, and his home will continue to be in this city, the Capital of 
the nation." 

Rev. Dr. Stuchell, who followed, said, among other things : 

" I have traveled over the length and breadth of this land a good deal, and, 
while from a clergyman who could not get a congregation, and from laymen 
jealous of success, I have heard harsh criticism, I have learned that Dr. Talmage 



288 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

has the ear of the people, and, what is more, the heart of the people. Whether in 
the palace of Chicago or San Francisco, or amidst the ignorance of the lonely hills, 
or the crudities of a mining camp, makes no difference ; the delight with which his 
sermons are read was expressed by a plain man, who said to me away off in the 
mountains, ' I would rather read them than a novel.' And the man who believes 
that such religious productions can be read without great good resulting utters a 
sad disparagement of the activity of the Holy Ghost. 

A FAME THAT TOUCHES EVERY LAND 

" A future age will value Dr. Talmage even more highly than we do. The 
success of our brother is due to no mere novelty of method, but to an innate force 
of genius that would have won distinction in many lines of activity. He is pos- 
sessed of a mastery of language that would have amazed a Johnson ; a picturesque- 
ness of style of which Macaulay would not have been ashamed; a vividness of 
presentation that in art might have produced a Turner, and a command of 
imagery that in a poet would have ranked him with Wordsworth and Tennyson. 
I am satisfied that he has exerted a tremendous influence for good on the church, 
the ministry and the country at large — an influence greatest, perhaps, where it has 
been unfelt. 

" I am not surprised that all do not like him any more than I am surprised 
that Whitefield was hooted through the streets and Spurgeon denounced as a 
babbler and Beecher as a demagogue ; nor shall I be greatly astonished if at a 
future day those four shall rank together as the characteristic preachers of the 
nineteenth century. Temperament decides much for us, though I cannot but 
wonder at the uncharitableness of those who condemn all with whom they dis- 
agree. In such a case, condemnation is self-condemnation. 

AN ASSOCIATE'S HEAR.TY EULOGIUM 

" I have felt it a privilege to be associated with Dr. Talmage, and after an 
intimacy that some might think incompatible with admiration, I say calmly that 
I admire him more to-day than I ever did. As Paul treated Timothy, so has 
he treated me. By patient considerateness and generous praise, he has rendered 
pleasant a situation that would otherwise have been trying if not unendurable. 
In the great man I have found a father in the Gospel, and though after his ten> 
porary conjunction I may return to the obscurity whence I came, I shall carry with 
me a recollection of this benevolence that was not in word only, but in deed ; of 
this whole-souled cordiality that forgot inequality of position in kindliness of 
friendship. It has been to me an opportunity for which I shall ever be grateful 
to listen to his sermons, so instructive in matter, so vivid in conception and 
delivery, so true to the old Gospel. 

" When a man reaches his years and his fame, it is scarcely fair that the 
precious time that would delight thousands should be spent in the routine duties of 



CALLED TO WASHINGTON 289 

a single pastorate ; the country at large, that has read his productions and followed 
his movements, has a kind of a claim upon him. The First Church has felt privil- 
eged to have its auditorium crowded, Sunday after Sunday, by people from all over 
the world, to hear the old, old story with new freshness and charm, and to return 
to invigorate and bless their particular homes. I therefore rejoice that the 
Doctor is freeing himself from this field that the country may be his field, and 
that it is to reap the benefit of that personal contact which it has hitherto been 
our especial and selfish privilege to enjoy. Of his generosity to the church I 
will not now speak, but until gratitude be dead it will be a theme of grateful 
recollection for all. 

" My hope is that these, the latter days of our brother, may be copiously 
blessed ; that the clouds may flee from an untroubled sky ; that the twilight may 
be long and serene, and that hereafter his soul may be rejoiced by the thousands in 
bright array, who, won by his tireless efforts and his consecrated eloquence, shall 
crowd to the heavenly portals to meet him and to bring him with the ' abundant 
entrance ' to the presence of his God." 

The close of the Washington ministry introduced Dr. Talmage into his true 
field of usefulness. He was able to respond to the calls which reached him from 
many States for special services. They had always been so numerous that it 
was impossible to accept them while he was the pastor of a church. His hands 
freed, he was able to visit cities to which he had often been importuned to go. 
His audiences filled the largest buildings that could be obtained and there were 
always crowds who could not gain an entrance. Thousands in our great cities 
owed to the freedom he gained by resigning the regular pastorate, the only oppor- 
tunity they ever had of hearing the famous preacher. North, South, East, and 
West, his welcome was alike enthusiastic and his audiences in whatsoever district 
he visited were spellbound by his eloquence. 



s 





LATER. SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 

IN THE SCOTTISH CAPITAL — PREACHING IN SWEDEN — " THE LAND OF THE MID- 
NIGHT SUN " — FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE VISITED — AT GLADSTONE'S HOME — 
IN BEAUTIFUL PARIS — KAISER WILHELM's CAPITAL — A VISIT TO VIENNA — 
DR. TALMAGE'S SECOND JOURNEY TO RUSSIA — WELCOMED BY CZAR NICHOLAS 



REED from the duties of local pastorate, Dr. Talmage now 
devoted himself to his literary and editorial duties, varying these 
tasks by frequent preaching and lecturing tours in the different 
States of the Union. He had a big, warm heart and generous 
5jp impulses, and he became personally interested in various philan- 

thropic movements, some of them of wide scope. His experience 
in the Russian relief movement had made him an earnest advocate of practical 
work of the same character in other directions, and in later years, with voice and 
pen, he greatly helped the cause of Armenian, Cuban and Porto Rican relief, the 
great India famine, and a few years ago, the Chinese relief movement. Alto- 
gether, with his splendid talent for reaching the popular heart, $2,000,000 was 
raised in these various world-wide charities. He was a member and active 
worker in a number of charitable organizations, but in these, as in all others of 
the same character, he invariably kept in the background. He was one of the 
incorporators of the Bowery Mission of Xew York, the pioneer of American 
rescue missions. 

PREACHING IN SCOTLAND'S CAPITAL 

In the summer of 1900 he again went abroad on an extended tour of 
preaching and sightseeing in Northern Europe. In the Scottish and English 
cities which he visited, he received the old-time rousing welcome. Edinburgh, 
the Scottish capital, gave him a splendid ovation. The people filled the great 
church in which he preached long before the hour fixed for the commence- 
ment of the service. Great crowds, sufficient to fill two such edifices, collected 
in the streets outside the church, and when the American preacher appeared he 
was greeted by such cheers as are seldom heard in the Scottish capital. The 
carriage of one of the officers of the church had been placed at his disposal, 
and standing there in the shadow of Arthur's seat, he made an eloquent address 

290 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



291 



to the great throng. On completing his tour in England and Scotland, Dr. Tal- 
mage went to Northern Europe. 

A VISIT TO FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 

While in Great Britain that year he visited the aged Florence Nightingale, 
the heroine of many battlefields and the mother of the modern field-hospital 
service. He wrote of this memorable visit : 

"Although she was prostrate upon a lounge, there was a vigor in her 
manner that would imply she had only reached mid-life. Her conversation had 
the sprightliness of a girl, but her countenance had in it the illumination of a 
long life occupied in helping others. Her features were sympathy enthroned. 




Florence nightingale: 

From a Famous Painting of the Celebrated Heroine of the War Hospitals 

There was something in her appearance almost supernatural. It is impossible 
to exercise the highest style of charities for a half-century, and that fact not be 
emblazoned on forehead and cheek. 



292 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" As we sat down beside the sofa on which she rested, we were at first 
overawed with the majesty of her presence, and then fascinated with the thought 
of the sufferings she had alleviated. 

"THE LADY OF THE LAMP" 

" She had never heard until we told her that she was called by the soldiers 
in the Crimean hospitals, ' the lady of the lamp,' because of her visits to their 
suffering cots in the night, carrying a lamp. At our own request, she told us of 
much that she had seen where there were no hospitals at all, and the wounded 
lay uncovered upon the battlefield. I said to her, ' You found that there was no 
poetry in war,' and she responded. ' Yes,' but I found poetry in the behavior of 
men under their pains, and in their sympathy for others who were in pain.' 
I asked her if it was not an awful pull on one's nerves to stand amid so many 
physical agonies. She said, ' We had no time to think of ourselves. There 
were the gashes to be bound up, and the broken bones to be set, and the dead 
to be buried, and we forgot our own fatigues and discomforts. I found them 
all gentlemen, and not one improper word did I ever hear one of them utter.' 




THE ALAMEDA PASSING THE GOLDEN GATE 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 293 

" In replv to a question she said, ' I never knew what it was to be really 
happy until I undertook the work of relief, and have never known an unhappy 
day since I undertook my mission.' As I had some new facts in regard to the 
famine in India and the efforts at relief, she made notes of what was said, her 
pencil and memorandum book close at hand throughout the conversation. She 
is as busy now in alleviation of the wounded in South Africa as she was busy 
at Sebastopol and Balaklava. Her room is the place where trained nurses go 
for instruction and inspiration. She is in constant communication with Lon- 
don hospitals, although she is not able to leave her house. Her head and 
heart are full of projects of alleviation. She was never more anxious to live, 
although now in her eighty-first year, and her one idea of life is opportunity 
to assuage human anguish. What a pity that such a woman will ever have to 
die as long as the world has sufferings to soothe ! Her house is m an unpretend- 
ing street, but a Queen of mercy is there enthroned, and a ladder bright as 
that which filled Jacob's dream is let down to that place night by night, and 
angels of God descend it, their wings loaded with benedictions. ' The Charge 
of the Light Brigade * is not more thrilling to me than the womanly bravery 
and sacrifice that took care of those who were shot from the saddles of the 
immortal ' six hundred.' " 

AT GLADSTONE'S HOME 

He also visited Hawarden Castle, where, as an old friend of Mr. Gladstone, 
he was cordially welcomed by the daughter of that distinguished statesman. 
He wrote on this occasion : 

" We went up the steps of the castle at Hawarden, the very steps, down 
which the late Mr. Gladstone accompanied us about eight or ten years ago, wish- 
ing us prosperous voyage. Miss Gladstone heartily greeted us, and announced 
her mother's serious indisposition. Through the rooms where the great octoge- 
narian had entertained us we were conducted. But, oh ! how changed was 
everything ! Most pathetic were the hats and staffs gathered upon a table to be 
worn and carried no more. Many of the books, and the scrolls, and the costly 
and elaborate gifts which had been shown us on our former visit had been 
removed, but the absence of that most magnificent personality of the nineteenth 
century most stirred us. There stood the marble bust of Mrs. Gladstone, appear- 
ing just as it did when her husband with so much pride called our attention 
to it. There were the paintings of the great orator and statesman; wroughc 
by skilful artists at various ages of his life. There was the table at which he 
inscribed for us his name on his translation into Greek of his favorite hymn, 
' Rock of Ages Cleft for Me.' There was the room in which he had thought out 
those marvelous speeches and orations which had moved the hemispheres. 
That was the scene of burden-bearing: during: four terms of Prime Ministry — 



294 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



a series of honors conferred upon no other man in all history. The entire castle 
and the grounds about it were solemn and tremendous with memories. 

" We had no foreboding of the additional shadow that in a few days must 
fall upon that historic place. In an upper room the widowed soul was already 
receiving the call to heavenly reunion. They had been parted two years, the 
usual time of separation for those who live together for half a century." 

A SERVICE IN STOCKHOLM 

During his tour, Dr. Talmage had a very interesting experience preaching 
in Stockholm, Sweden. In letters home he gave a picturesque account of the 
day and some characteristic comments on the condition of preachers as he saw 
them in that country. He writes : 

" Sabbath in Stockholm, was to me a day of much interest. Before leav- 
ing London I accepted an invitation to preach here in a church of vast propor- 
tions. ' Would I have an audience ? ' was the wonder with me. when I could 
not speak a work of the Swedish language. But a publisher of Stockholm put 




THE GLADSTONE FAMILY IN THE GROUNDS OF HAWARDEN 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



295 



upon my table in the hotel ten different books of mine, all in Swedish, and that 
prepared me for the greeting I received in The Immanuel Church at eleven 
o'clock Sabbath morning. All must be done through an interpreter. I asked 
him before entering the pulpit if he would translate sentence by sentence or 
would take each idea after it was uttered. He preferred sentence by sentence, 
and so it was done. Only three times had I ever attempted to address an 




THE HEIR APPARENT OF" DENMARK AND HIS WIFE 



296 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

audience through the brain and lips of another ; once when a theological student, 
standing before a congregation of American Indians ; once in a church at 
Hawaii, and once in Ceylon, an interpreter standing on the right of me to 
translate what I said into Cingalese, and the other on my left side to translate 
into Hindustani, my interpreters taking two-thirds of the time, while 1 took 
one-third. In the Stockholm church — an immense church with galleries on 
three sides — the pastor had first to request two very deaf people who, with ear- 
trumpets, sat in the pulpit, to remove, as otherwise there would not be room 
for the preacher of the day, and his interpreter. The hymns were given out, 
the Scriptures were read and prayer was offered by the Swedish interpreter. 

A SYMPATHETIC AUDIENCE 

" The sevice was not embarrassing ; the audience were very sympathetic : 
the translator was alert and fluent, and the people seemed to understand, for the 
emotions of joy and sadness and sympathy and devotion were easily seen in 
their countenances. Whether I did them any good or not, they did me good, 
for it is impossible to stand in an audience of five thousand, the most of them 
good people, without being in body, mind and soul advantaged. But we real- 
ized as never before what a comparatively easy thing it is to preach in one's 
native tongue the glorious Gospel, the language in which we spoke our first 
word and will probably speak our last. 

" The church in Sweden is favored by the State, and the Queen is a goodly 
woman, interested deeply in all religious movements, and frowning upon all dis- 
sipation and frivolity. The throne is on the side of righteousness. But when 
we saw the invalided Queen of Sweden and Norway, by the aid of three servants, 
dismount from a little white pony that had been led through the king's park 
to give her a healthful airing, the Queen unable to take a step without assist- 
ance, and each step a positive suffering, we thought how gladly she would, if 
possible, exchange throne and crown and palace for the blooming cheeks and 
the easy walk and the bounding pulses of the humblest peasant woman in 
yonder market-place, who hands a basket of berries to her customer, and who, 
with pleased look, makes the change of a silver ' kroner.' ' 

THE MIDNIGHT SUN 

In " the Land of the Midnight Sun " he revelled in the glorious and majes- 
tic scenery of the North Cape. From Trondhjem he wrote this superb bit of 
description of the midnight sun, as seen from the sea : 

" It is summer, but all our blankets and furs are brought into service. Good- 
bye to straw hats and thin shawls. In a few hours we have passed from June 
into November. Our faith in the integrity of watches and clocks is very much 
shaken. They say it is nine o'clock, and ten o'clock, and eleven o'clock, and yet 
not even a hint of darkness. But all the watches cannot be in conspiracy to 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



297 



deceive, and every man who has a watch is looking at it, and all the chro- 
nometers agree in saying it is ten minutes of midnight. At this time a great 
thick cloud drops over the sun. We have come four thousand miles through 
the isles of the great theatre of nature, and alas ! there is a prospect that the 
main actor will not appear upon the stage. Having disappointed so many, will 
he disappoint us? But no; to our delight the sun appears. 

THE SPECTACLE AT SEA 

" Our steamer has moved out of the fjord into the open sea that nothing 
may hinder our view. The shimmering waters of the polar sea have become 
forty miles of richest mosaic, and all the angels of beauty and splendor having 
come down on ladders divinely lowered, walk those pavements of mosaic, and 
they look like the floor of heaven across which trail the white robes of the 
beatific. The sun is so bright we looked at it through smoked glasses. The 
sky was on fire. Enough clouds nearby to make an upholstery of flame. 
Horses of fire, and chariots of fire rolling through cities of fire. Great master- 
piece of the Almighty in the gallery of the sky ! Sunrise and sunset married. 




VIEWING THE MIDNIGHT SUN 



298 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



Niagara of fire. Strange, weird, overwhelming spectacle, smiting all other 
natural brilliance into nihility. Seaiching enough, overmastering enough, 
glorious enough to be the Eye which never slumbers nor sleeps. We had seen 
the morning sun, and the noonday sun and the setting sun, but never before 
had we seen and never again will we see the Midnight Sun. From what vats 
of infinite beauty were these colors dipped? A commingling of hues to be 
found in such excess on no other sky and on no other sea, amber and gold ; 
lavender blending with royal purple ; all the shades of yellow, orange and 
canary and lemon ; all shades of blue, turquoise and sapphire and navy and 
marine and azure; all shades of green, olive and myrtle and nile; all shades of 
red, scarlet and magenta and cardinal, the fiery red cooling into gray, and the 
gray warming into ruby. Now amethyst seems about to triumph until emerald 
appears, but the emerald is soon outdone by the carbuncle. It is in some 
respects the most impressive scene in the whole world. 

" The sun seems disposed to go to bed at the right time, but it does not 
like the wet pillow offered it, or it changes its mind, for you watch expecting 
it to hide beneath the wave. But no ! Like unto its behavior in Joshua's time, 
it seems to stand still. Afterward it begins to rise. It banishes the night. It 




LABOR ONE OF THE SCULPTURES AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



290 



forbids the moon and stars to appear. These lesser lights seem to say : ' There 
is no use in our shining, for the sun does enough of that for all.' Victory of 
light over darkness ! The shadows told to go and hide themselves in the dens 
and caves of the earth ! 

THE USES OF DARKNESS 

Sun is the perpetual light. There is no suggestion of retirement. You stay up 
until twelve o'clock to see the wonder in the heavens, and you are so thrilled 
with the scene — if you have any soul in you — that you must talk it over until 
one or two o'clock in the morning, and at that hour it is as bright as twelve 
o'clock at noon in Washington or in New York, and why should you seek your 
pillow at all? Nothing but force of resolution, and a rehearsal of sanitary law, 
and an extemporaneous discourse on the uses of sleep can send you to your state- 
room, and, reaching it, you find the place flooded with light and all the scene 
proposing activity instead of somnolence. The result is that many people come 
down from the North Cape nervous wrecks. They have acquired an insomnia 
which only weeks of regular habits can extirpate. With what joy we welcomed 
the night after we had come down into lower latitudes ! Oh, the practical uses 
of the night ! Shadows as important as the sunshine. Midnight as useful as 
the midmoon. We may say of the polar seas which we visited as it was said 




THE PARLIAMENT HOUSES AT BUDAPEST 



3 oo T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

of a much better place, ' There is no night there.' But in the one case it was 
descriptive of a perpetual joy, for there is in that land no fatigue to be solaced, 
but in the other case it is descriptive of a disquietude, because we must have 
hours shaded for rest. 

" Yet these polar regions have as many seasons of darkness as seasons of 
light. From the 23d of September until the 22d of March it is continuous 
night. The inhabitants long for the morning. Lanterns and candles below, 
moon and stars above are the only alleviations. Think of it ! midnight through 
all of October, all of November, all of December, all of January, all of Febru- 
ary, and most of March. I wonder if the roosters know when to crow, the 
sleepers when to rise. I wonder if imbecility and unhealth of all sorts are not 
the result. Thank God, all ye who live in latitudes where the days and nights 
are not so long. Light for enough hours to do our work. Darkness for 
enough hours to favor refreshing unconsciousness. Let all who live in the 
temperate zone rejoice in the place of their habitation. 

A PATRIOTIC "FOURTH" 

" On our way down from the North Cape it was Fourth of July, and the 
anniversary of American Independence was celebrated. The captain of our ship, 
a Norwegian, himself genial as a bank of honeysuckle, decorated the dining 
table with American flags. We all sang the ' Star Spangled Banner,' that is, 
as much of it as we could remembex", all joining in the first line, half of us joining 
in the second line, two or three voices in the third line, but the last voice gave 
out in the fourth line, and then we all quit, but when our music failed we burst 
into a chorus of patriotic laughter which saved the occasion from embarrass- 
ment. Called upon to say a few words appropriate to the day when Americans 
in towns and cities all around the world were in celebration, my theme of 
' International Brotherhood ' was suggested by the presence in that dining 
room of Norwegians, Swedes, Da^es, Germans, Frenchmen, English and Amer- 
icans, and I could not help express the wish that as we were then sailing 
together we all might have a smooth voyage across the seas of this life, and at 
last drop anchor in harbor eternal, and if ever, betAveen this and that, mis- 
fortune and trial should come upon us that the darkness might be irradiated by 
a Midnight Sun." 

AMONG DENMARK'S PRINCES 

Writing from Copenhagen, he recorded these impressions of brave little 
Denmark, its royal rulers and its love of art : 

" The King of Denmark was absent from his capital, and so the Crown 
Prince received us in his palace and all his family came in with hearty greetings, 
and a more delightful domestic group was never gathered. From the uncon- 
ventional manner in which they received my family and myself, one would not 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



301 



think there had ever been a crown in the ancestral line or ever would be. Him- 
self on the way to a throne and a brother of the Princess of Wales and of the 
King of Greece and of the Dowager-Empress of Russia and all his life mingling 



* " 


1 *p» % 

./ 


i 




w^ V„^' 


s 


. 




^9 



THe CROWN PRINCE OP DENMARK 



3 02 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

with royalties, he was less pretentious than any of the officers in the anteroom 
of the palace. He freely and familiarly conversed of the great international 
questions which are now disturbing Europe and Asia. He will soon take the 
government, for his father is eighty-four years of age and must soon by natural 
law put down the sceptre. The Queen, though heir to uncounted millions, has 
not been made worldly, but is chiefly interested in religious work in all parts 
of the world. The home-life of this family is an illustrious example to all the 
domestic life of Denmark, as the home-life of his sister en the throne of Russia 
was an inspiring example to all the homesteads of Russia. 

" The oldest daughter of this princely household is a marvel of beauty and 
good sense, speaking English almost as well as Danish. The younger daughter 
excused herself for an afternoon horseback ride, and on our way out through 
the palace park we saw her riding under the careful guardianship of a groom. 
After conversation the whole group accompanied us in a ramble through the 
royal gardens; amid trees themselves monarchs and by fountains that had 
crowns of rainbow and by flower beds where queens of beauty reigned. After 
the ladies of our party had captured all the princely autographs they wished 
to win, we left this brilliant home. But the kindness of these royal folks did 
not cease when Ave descended the steps, for the lovely group of the palace stood 
waving to us from the windows as long as we were in sight, so that the warmth 
of the welcome was not more marked than was the heartiness of the good-bye. 

THE ART OF DENMARK 

" It is remarkable that Copenhagen seems yet presided over by Thorwald- 
sen's spirit, although that greatest sculptor of his time dropped dead in the 
theatre of this city more than half a century ago. Though born here, a 
comparatively small part of his life was passed in this Danish capital. His father, 
a carver of figureheads for ships, the immortal son began with such cuttings 
in wood and kept on until for all ages to come he carved in stone the figures 
of Day and Night and the Seasons and Adonis and Ganymede and Mercury 
raid the Graces, and five hundred specimens of sculpture. When he returned 
from Rome, where he chose to study and work for the most of his artist's life, 
not only Copenhagen, but the nation, joined in procession to welcome him. He 
sleeps in the yard of the museum named after him, in a bank of flowers, the place 
selected by himself. But whichever way you go in the city, you find something 
Thorwaldsenian. While you worship in one of the churches, the twelve apostles 
look down upon you while they are wrapped in robes of marble that seem soft 
as velvet, and garments, the curves and wrinkles of which seem the work of a 
clothier rather than of a sculptor, while the countenances of the sacred twelve 
give expression to the courage or the caution or the wisdom or the faith or the 
love which was supposed to be the apostolic characteristic. Indeed, the most 
of Thorwaldsen's later works were consecrated to religion. 



-^ j 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



303 



" To me the most impressive of all his statuary is his figure of Christ. It 
is gigantic in size, but the alliance of tenderness and power in the countenance 
of our Lord, and the outspread arms of invitation, and the planting of the 
foot with infinite firmness, proclaim him ready to wipe a tear, or able to save a 
world.'' 

BEAUTIFUL PARIS! 

Paris, when he reached it, was in the full tide of celebration of the World's 
Fair. This grandest of European enterprises, Dr. Talmage finely described in 
a long letter home, from which, however, we can only find space for an extract. 
He wrote : 

" The wmole Exposition is a glory beyond that which any finite mind can 
grasp or fully appreciate. The most interesting and best managed department 
is the American exhibit. General Peck, the Commissioner-General, brought 
with him his experience at the Chicago World's Fair, and after three years of 
hard work in Paris, and with a tax upon his patience and endurance that would 
have destroyed an ordinary man, has completed the work that ought to be the 






^tm& 



THE EIFFEL TOWER AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION 



304 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

exultation of all Americans, and should win for him the congratulations of the 
Congress of the United States. 

" To augment our appreciation of the greatness of our American exhibit, 
we need to call to mind that while the Commissioner-Generals from Russia, 
Germany, Belgium and Austria were empowered by their governments to take 
whatever they wished and display it at Paris, our American Commissioner- 
General had no such power, but must have the consent of the owner, and so 
had less opportunity than other Commissioner-Generals, who could command 
what picture, what statuary, what machinery, what textile, he wished to put 
before the world. We should also appreciate the fact that while other coun- 
tries could, with comparative ease, send their products to this fair, many of our 
American industries had first to cross the American Continent, and then 
cross three thousand miles of sea, and again take a freight train for a long dis- 
tance before reaching destination. The extent and splendor of our American 
department is five times more and better than anyone had a right to expect. 

" We have this summer twice crossed the Continent of Europe, going and 
coming, and the place we have found most reasonable in its charges is Paris. 
If you want to get skinned alive, go to Denmark, or Norway, or Russia, or Ger- 
many, or Austria as summer tourists. The story of disappearing roubles and 
florins is more startling than the story of escaping francs and crowns. But 
the only really economical thing a summer tourist can do is to go home. There- 
is no maxim one oftener quotes to himself while traveling abroad than the say- 
ing which the Sunday School boy quoted as, marching in procession with other 
children, he put his pennies into the missionary box, supposing he was quoting 
an appropriate passage of Scripture : ' A fool and his money are soon parted.' 

RARE WORKS OF ART 

" I can imagine nothing more inspiring than a walk amid the sculpture of 
all nations as here you see it. Even that which is done in cast of plaster skil- 
fully gives the thought of the great artist. If you want to find genius exalted, 
here behold Victor Hugo enthroned on the rocks, his great forehead hovering 
over the scene, while a figure representing music, hands up to him a harp; 
and another form holds a mask, suggestive of the drama, for which he did such 
matchless things ; and another lifts a lash, to suggest the chastisements with 
which he struck upstart monarchy and sham, while the winged angel of fame 
stands with trumpet to lip, ready to sound his praises through all time. If you 
would see grief of parting wrought in stone, here it is in ' Emigrants' Adieu.'" 
Would you find devotion — here it is in ' Pater-noster ' — showing a girl at 
prayer. Would you see savagery about to rend and devour — look at Gardell's 
' Tigress.' Would you see a child's glee — look here at the boy carrying a 
goose. Would you realize the agony of those on a wreck at sea, hailing a ship 
in the distance — study the way Robert Stigal freezes it into bronze. Would 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



305 



you behold a specimen of the sublimest impudence — yonder is Marc Antony 
in gilded chariot drawn by three lions, he leading the fourth. Would you know 
how heaven-sent charity illumines the countenance — look at the statues of those 
philanthropists. Would you see the spirit of play — there it is in Guillonnet's 
' Foot-ball.' Would you have illustrated how human intelligence can triumph 
over brute force — look at that ' Hungarian Horse-Breaker.' Would you have 
demonstrated, so that you can never forget it, helpful sympathy for the wounded 
— look at Sicard's ' Good Samaritan.' Would you learn the terror of an 
offended conscience — stand a while before that ' Cain and Abel.' Would you 
realize what Christian eloquence can accomplish — listen, for standing there 
you can hear as well as see, Bossuet in ,a burst of holy oratory, which moves 
his audience till some are ready to spring to their feet and others swoon into 
tears. In one hour you can, in this congregation of the world's sculpture, see 
all the passions, rage or triumph, and all the grandeurs unroll. Coming down 

from amid the statuary, one 
feels that he has descended 
from Mont Blanc, the snow- 
white heights of the world's 
sculpture." 

THE KAISER'S CAPITAL 

From Berlin, which he also 
visited during the same sum- 
mer's tour, he wrote home a 
glowing account of the high 
artistic taste, cleanliness, pros- 
perity, sobriety and health ful- 
ness of the Kaiser's capital. 
Of the Emperor he said: 

" He has enlisted the hearts 
of all his people. While many 
criticise his pronunciamentos 
and do not like this, or do not 
like that, William II. will hand 
down to his son a mightier 
sceptre than that which he re- 
ceived from the dying hand of 
his father, Emperor Frederick, 
who reigned only ninety-three 
days, and which his grand- 
father wielded twenty-seven 
years. German blood has iron 




the Emperor of Germany 



20 



3o6 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



in it, and the German government will last long after frivolous France and 
cruel Spain have again and again changed from republicanism to monarchy, 
and from monarchy back to republicanism. The present Emperor is ubiquit- 
ous ; now laying the corner-stone of a church, now unveiling a monument, 




I I 




OLGA, QUEEN OF GREECE 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



307 



now launching a ship, now reviewing a regiment, now in one city and now in 
another. At a Punch-and-Judy show, some time ago, the performer gave what 
he considered the characteristics of the three Emperors who reigned within 
four months over Germany, Kaiser William, Frederick and William II. The 
man of the show said : ' Kaiser William will be remembered by his saying, 
" I have no time to be weary." Emperor Frederick had for characteristic utter- 
ance, " It is well to suffer without complaining." 

"AUGUSTA. PACK THE TRUNKS!" 

" ' The present Emperor will be known for his familiar saying, " Augusta ! 
pack the trunks." For this disrespect the showman was two months imprisoned. 
After he had served his time in jail and had come out, he continued his show, 
but with the following change of remark : ' Kaiser William will be remem- 
bered by saying, " I have no time to be weary," Emperor Frederick by his 
saying, " It is well to suffer without complaining." But I am not permitted to 
say what is the characteristic saying of the present Emperor.' Then the au- 
dience supplied the lacking information by shouting, ' Augusta ! pack the 
trunks.' 

" But Emperor William loses nothing through this facetiousness. There 
is an earnest side to his nature which all recognize. He preached a sermon on 




WINTER PALAC^ RUSSIA 



! 



308 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



his yacht a few days ago, a mere extract going through the press, but my 
learned and genial friend, Rev. Dr. Dickey, pastor of the American church in 
Berlin, for whom I preached while in Berlin, has translated the Emperor's 
sermon, which must have taken three-quarters of an hour in delivery, and is 
very forceful and brilliant. He is the only Emperor I ever heard of who 
preached, although King David provided texts for a great many sermons, but 
why not kings and emperors take the pulpit?" 

A LOOKER-ON IN VIENNA 

He reached Vienna in the season of fetes and decorations. This little lit- 
erary etching of Emperor Francis Josef, taken from one of Dr. Talmage's 
letters, is worth preserving : 

" The Emperor is a unique personality, and but for the people's love for 
him, the empire would long ago have been divided. Hungary is as anxious 




THE ROYAL PALACE AT POTSDAM 



now to be independent as in the days when Louis Kossuth struck for freedom, 
and his son now stands in the Hungarian Parliament with an influence that 
halts legislation concerning the empire whenever he will. But Emperor Francis 
Josef is so kind, so charitable, so sympathetic, so helpful, that while he lives 
Austria will remain intact. Every one knows some story of his compassion and 
generosity. Hearing that one of his officers who had become blind had said 
that his only comfort now was music, the Emperor gives the poor man a seat 
for life in the opera house. By such deeds he has won all hearts. His agoniz- 
ing bereavements have intensified the affection of the people for their ruler. 
The suicide or murder of his only son (and it still remains a mystery how he 
was done to death) and the assassination of the Empress two years ago, have 
called forth a loyal love seldom seen in other nations. Having no son to sua- 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



309 



ceed him he is educating his nephew for the throne — a splendid lad of thirteen 
or fourteen years. 

" Otto, the father of the lad, would have been the next Emperor, but he 
does not want the throne, and no one in the empire wants him to take it. He is 




% 






^ 



£MPEROR FRANZ JOSEPH OP AUSTRIA 



310 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

one-half bad and one4ialf imbecile. He keeps the air full of scandalization. He 
goes into a restaurant,' orders all others persons to depart, and having taken full 
possession of the place, he and the group of wild fellows with him drink them- 
selves drunk, and then smash crockery, and the decanters, and the tables, and 
the window glass, and no one dare protest, for he belongs to the imperial family. 
But the next day, the bill for his roystering destructiveness is sent to the 
Emperor, and he pays it. 

" Otto is the terror of the neighborhoods when he is inflamed of strong 
drink. Riding on horseback through the country districts, he met a funeral 
procession of peasants. As is the custom, they were carrying the coffin on their 
shoulders. Otto made them stop, and put the coffin on the ground, and then 
he with his horse leaped over the coffin this way and that until the drunken 
delirium was satisfied. Hearing of this, or some equal offensiveness, the 
Emperor called this erratic specimen of royalty into his presence and severely 
reprimanded him. Otto was soon after seated at his own table with some 
rollicking companions, and, when the Emperor's name was mentioned, Otto 
said : ' I will show you my opinion of the Emperor.' Then the outrageous 
eccentric lifted from the table a bowl of greens and took it to a statue or bust 
of the Emperor standing in the room, and poured the greens over it, thus 
obliterating all the attractiveness of that work of art. The Emperor heard of 
this, and commanded the recreant man into his presence and told him that, he 
knew of the insult offered him on that occasion, and in the presence of the 
imperial family and their guests, he boxed Otto's ears ! " 

AN IMPERIAL MAUSOLEUM 

He visited the tombs of the Hapsburgs while in Vienna, and he writes of 
this occasion : 

" The mausoleums are in the basement of the church. The sad and solemn 
procession having reached the iron gate, the nearest relative knocks on the 
gate, and the robed ecclesiastic within asks, ' Who is there, and why do you 
come ?' and the leader of the procession replies, ' I am Maria Theresa, Empress 
of Austria. I come wishing my soul conducted to the realms of the blessed 
and my body put in sepulchre !' Then the gate is opened, and, with chanting, 
the body is welcomed and entombed. Of course, the right name of the ruler 
buried is mentioned. But Empress Elizabeth was taken to the tomb in this 
church with a different utterance. The service for the dead being concluded, 
the Emperor, with trembling hand knocked at the iron gate of'the mausoleum, 
and the priest within asked: ' Who is there, and why do you come?' And the 
answer given was this : ' I, Francis Josef, Emperor of Austria, come with 
Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, asking that her soul be conducted to the realm 
of the blessed, and that her body be put in sepulchre ! ' Then she who had 
been the most beautiful woman in Europe and who had ridden with the 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 



3ii 



Emperor into battle with the hosts of Austria and who had been the dashing 
equestrienne on as spirited a horse as was ever bitted or saddled, easily control- 
ing the whirlwind with her riding whip, now lies down haggard and broken- 
hearted." 

A SECOND VISIT TO RUSSIA 

During this summer of 1900, Dr. Talmage paid his second visit to Russia. 
Although eight years had passed since he last visited St. Petersburg — being then 




THE CZAR OF RUSSIA AND HIS FAMILY 



on his " mission of bread " — he was remembered and accorded a generous 
welcome by the leading officials of the capital and by the members of the nobil- 
ity. He was also invited to visit at the imperial palace. But we will let him 
tell of this in his own language, taken from a letter written at the time : 

" I was told that the Russian Emperor wished to see me again, but I did not 
know until a few hours before presentation that my wife and daughters would 



3 i2 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 313 

be invited to appear at court. This reception is a revival of the friendship 
formed in 1892, which friendship has been strengthened by tokens of regard 
and kindly communications again and again. 

HE MEETS EMPEROR NICHOLAS 

" I found the Emperor strong and well, looking not a day older than when 
I met him before. He said : ' I was twenty-four when you were here the other 
time ; I am now thirty-two.' 

" The care of empire have not put one wrinkle on his face, although he has 
passed since I saw him from being Crown Prince to the throne. He is five 
feet ten inches in stature, is a blonde, of fair complexion, and has blue eyes. 
He is all animation, perfectly natural and without any assumption of manner. 
Kindness and good cheer are dominant in his make-up. He is personally at 
peace with all the world, notwithstanding that the Chinese have declared war 
against Russia, and this country is always ready to defend itself. 

" He said to me : 4 How many important things have happened since we 
met ! My father, whom you saw on the throne, is gone. My mother has passed 
through three great sorrows since you were here ; the loss of my father, the 
loss of my brother, and during the last year, the loss of her mother, the Queen 
of Denmark. But she endures all, and is well and wished to see you, but in 
her own palace. Since we last met, the Spanish-American war has occurred ! ' 

AMERICA'S GIFT REMEMBERED 

"He laughed heartily at the fact that in one battle the only loss of life 
was that of a mule. 

" When I remarked that our war with Spain had raised a new crop of heroes, 
he replied: ' Yes !' And then he easily called over the names of some of 
those who, on sea and land, distinguished themselves in that conflict. 

" Speaking of the ship-load of breadstuffs sent on the steamship Leo by 
The Christian Herald for the alleviation of the famine in Russia, in 1892, he said: 

" ' How kind that was in you Americans to send that help at a tune when 
many of my poor countrymen so sorely needed it. It was a great mercy and 
we can never forget it.' 

" When I referred to the cordiality between our nations, and the fact that 
I had talked with his father about the interest that Russia had taken in Amer- 
ican affairs during our Civil War, he said: 'Oh, yes; my father toM me all 
about our Russian fleets in the harbors of New York and San Francisco, to 
keep off your foreign enemies.' 

PRESENTED TO THE EMPRESS 

" At the close of this interview, we were conducted by officers of the court 
Into the room of the Empress. She talked with the ladies of my family as she 



3H 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



would with sisters. She is very beautiful; her cheeks are aglow with health, 
and she has suavity in every posture and word. She is taller than the Emperor. 
She expresses her opinion without reserve. Evidenly this royal marriage 
was a love match, and not a marital alliance for political and international ends. 
The Empress has three daughters, but no son. We heard their frolic and 
laughter in other rooms. The land that had an Empress Catherine the first, 
and an Empress Catherine the second, can never have another Empress, for 
the law now demands that a man and not a woman must govern Russia. 
Hence, with great interest this nation watches the imperial cradle. If there 
be no son in this family, then Michael, the brother of the present Emperor, will 
inherit the throne. 

THE DOWAGER EMPRESS ALSO 



" But there was another pleasure to come. Before we left the dining hall 
in the palace of Peterhof, we received an invitation from the Dowager Empress 

to visit her in her palace. A more delighted 
group than my family were you cannot imag- 
ine, for I had so often related to them how 
extraordinary a woman for graciousness and 
charm the former Empress of Russia was. 
We had to wait but a short time when the 
Dowager Empress entered the room. Al- 
though she has gone through so many bereave- 
ments, she looked exactly as when I saw her 
eight years ago. She made loving inquiry 
concerning her brother, the Crown Prince of 
Denmark, who had sent her a message by us. 
She was full of reminiscence. She said: ' Do 
you remember the handful of flowers I plucked 
from this arch, and sent them to your family? 
You stood there ; and I, with my smaller chil- 
dren, stood there. How well I remember that 
day, but oh, what changes ! ' Then her eyes 
filled with tears and her voice trembled. 
Though she is the daughter of a king, and 
was the wife of an emperor, and is the sister of 
the King of Greece and is the mother of an 
emperor, her manners are as un affected as those of any lady we ever saw. She 
laughed and joked with the ladies, asked familiar questions and interested us all 
as we have never been interested. She invited us to come, the day after, to her 
palace, and see the Queen of Greece, who is now visiting Russia, and who had 
received me at Athens years ago, but our pians would not allow it. 




W 



CROWN PRINCESS STEPHANIE OF AUSTRIA 



LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 315 

" The imperial carriage that had met us at the train returned us, and the 
representative of our American Embassy accompanied us to St. Petersburg, 
and we felt that we all had passed a day of absorbing interest." 

MRS. TALMAGE'S IMPRESSIONS 

One of the most pleasing literary souvenirs of Dr. Talmage's travels 
during the summer of 1900 is the following letter from Mrs. Talmage, written 
after her return, which records her impressions, in true womanly fashion, of 
what she saw and heard during her sojourn amid royal palaces : 

" No sooner had I stepped ashore from the Oceanic than the question was 
asked me for publication : k You have had abundant opportunity this summer 
of studying royalty in Europe. What do you think of it in comparison with 
republican simplicity? ' As this question has come to me repeatedly I proceed 
to answer it, though somewhat reluctantly. 

" Yes, we have had an opportunity of seeing the inside of palaces, and com- 
muning with princely and imperial households, such as has seldom been granted 
to persons unofficial. The publication of my husband's sermons in all the lan- 
guages of Europe for many years seemed to open every door we might wish 
to enter. And the first remark I desire to make, in reply to the question as 
to the contrast between republican simplicity and royal manners, is that there 
is no contrast at all. The higher in station the more unpretending the per- 
sonage. It is the people who are afraid of losing their place, or who are strug- 
gling for something higher, that take on airs. The higher the Prince or Prin- 
cess, the Emperor or Empress, the more unconventional. Republican sim- 
plicity is no more marked than royal simplicity. 

THE REAL LIFE OF A PALACE 

" While the show-rooms of palaces may be bejeweled, and richly uphol- 
stered, and embanked with lustrous statuary, and aglow with masterpieces of 
painting, the living rooms of European potentates are for the most part as 
plain as the rooms of people ordinarily prosperous. While the tourist, cata- 
logue in hand, is permitted to pass through sleeping apartments which were 
once occupied by some Marie Antoinette, or Napoleon, or Marie Teresa, and 
the pillows of the couch and the canopy are ablaze with splendor, for the most 
part the sleeping apartments are as unpretending as a hundred homes in the 
same city of Berlin, or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Copenhagen. While the 
banquet of a king or queen might easily swamp what we would call many 
thousands of dollars, and the gleam of the chalice, and the flash of the plate 
are something to be remembered for a lifetime, the ordinary breakfast or 
luncheon or dinner of a palace is as plain as ordinary cutlery, and table-cloth, 
and ice-pitcher can make it. The breakfast room at Stockholm where King 
Oscar and his Queen sit, morning alter morning, is probably as simple as the 



316 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




LATER SOJOURNS IN EUROPE 317 

breakfast room of many of those who read this sketch. When Emperor Fran- 
cis Josef invites any one to dine with him at Vienna, he sometimes apologizes 
for the plainness of the meal. Mr. Gladstone, who was in some respects a 
king, called the repast to which he invited my husband at Hawarden ' a few 
snacks.' 

A CHAT WITH ROYALTY 

" The conversation of these people is surprisingly familiar. The Empress 
of Russia, without any hesitation, expressed to me the preference she had for 
the Chinese above the Japanese. She said : ' The Japanese may pretend to 
be friendly, but they stab you in the dark.' She cannot forget that when 
Nicholas, now her husband, was traveling in Japan, he received a ruffian stroke 
that felled him senseless, and that now, when the Emperor is excited or over- 
worked, that Japanese wound of many years ago still disturbs him. 

" The Crown Prince of Denmark, in style and language that we are familiar 
with in our own homes, said to us : ' Come, let me show you into my den,' 
and then took us through his study. And the Crown Princess said to me : 
' Come, let me show you my garden. You will find it as quiet as though it 
were many miles from human habitation, though only five miles from Copen- 
hagen.' With what simplicity the Dowager Empress of Russia showed us her 
pictures and asked us about where we had been, and invited us to come again 
on the morrow. Simplicity reigns in all the high places we were permitted to 



In April, 1900, while the Christian Herald was engaged in its great relief 
work in India, Dr. Talmage and Dr. Klopsch met in London and consulted 
regarding relief plans. The preacher-editor was then in England on a Gospel 
tour, and Dr. Klopsch was on his way to India to inspect the famine camps. 
The two were entertained at luncheon at the Mansion House by the Lord Mayor 
of London. That official expressed his warm admiration of American benevo- 
lence. Lord George Hamilton, the British Secretary of State for India, with 
whom Dr. Klopsch had discussed relief plans, was also amazed and greatly 
impressed by the magnitude of America's generosity. Nearly a million dollars 
had already been raised through the paper of which Dr. Talmage was the Editor- 
in-chief; and two shiploads of American grain had been sent to Bombay and 
Calcutta; but the benevolence did not stop there. It took the more permanent 
form of an endowment of $75,000 per annum for the support of 5,500 helpless 
India famine orphans, who are now the beneficiaries of American benevolence. 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 

the) last southern journey — addressing great audiences in richmond, 
macon, charleston and new orleans — a memorable welcome in 
Louisiana's capital city 




ARLY in February, 1902, Dr. Talmage set out upon what was destined 
to be his last Gospel tour on earth. Like Paul, he was beginning to 
be burdened with infirmities, yet his enthusiasm in the Gospel was 
unabated and the fires of his splendid eloquence were undimmed. 

He had a long-standing preaching engagement in the Crescent 
City, where the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church, and 
thousands of the citizens affiliated with other churches, were looking" forward 
to his visit with pleasure. 

His Southern journey was destined to be an eventful 
one. He narrowly escaped injury in a train wreck at Val- 
dosta, Ga., caused by an open switch. As it was. the train 
in which he rode was so roughly shaken up that all the pas- 
sengers suffered, though not seriously. The Doctor escaped 
with no worse misfortune than a severe shock and the loss of 
part of his baggage. That shock it was afterward believed, 
was largely responsible for the illness which followed and 
which ended his earthly career. 

A GREAT AUDIENCE AT RICHMOND 

The last great meeting for men which he addressed was 
held at Richmond, Virginia, on Sunday afternoon, February 
second, under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian 
Association of that city. Mr. Samuel K. McKee, the Gen- 
eral Secretary of the Association, gives an interesting and 
spirited account of the Richmond meeting. He writes: 

" It was the first of nine consecutive weeks' Greater 
Men's Meetings in the Academy of Music. Dr. Talmage 
had arrived in the city on Saturday night, accompanied by 
Mrs. Talmage, every arrangement being complete for the 
great service. The Doctor was entertained at the home of 




HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



319 



his daughter, Mrs. Allen E. Donnan, and when visited by the General Secretary, 
Mr. S. K. McKee, and Rev. Dr. R. P. Kerr, of the First Presbyterian Church, 
he was found to be in the best of spirits and seemed unusually robust. He talked 
very entertainingly of the famous men whom he had met, and of his many trips, 
especially his last to the Holy Land. He seemed to be deeply in earnest con- 
cerning the services of the coming Sabbath. Snow had fallen and the streets 
were in a miserable condition ; notwithstanding this fact, a tremendous audience 
of men was present. The Academy, including extra chairs upon the platform, 
seats about sixteen hundred persons. The meeting was announced for three- 
thirty. Long before the hour, hundreds were waiting for admission. 

" The doors were opened at 
3.06 p. m., and in six minutes' 
time fully two thousand men 
were in the house. The serv- 
ice began at three-seventeen, 
and the lowest estimate of at- 
tendance was twenty-eight 
hundred; so dense was the 
crowd that the aisles on the 
first and second and third 
floors could not be seen. Hun- 
dreds were turned away. It 
was a great occasion, and Dr. 
Talmage seemed to under- 
stand this. Never before have 
I seen thirteen hundred men 
stand at least two hours and 
a half at a religious meeting. 
After the opening song serv- 
ice, he read the Scripture Les- 
son and then spoke upon the 
theme, ' Encouragement.' It 

was a plain, yet eloquent, talk, interspersed with pointed sentences and illus- 
trations that men will not soon forget. He seemed to throw all that was in him 
into the service. It was intensely earnest, and I shall never forget how he said 
something like this: ' Men, Satan don't ask you to continue in sin for six months 
or a year, but just this once.' He closed his stirring address with an earnest 
appeal to men to become Christians. Many requested prayer, and my recollec- 
tion is, ten decision cards were secured. 

A LABOR. OF LOVE 

" Dr. Talmage was asked to open the series of meetings. His coming did 
much to insure the large attendance at the meetings, and to provide the sinews 




Y. M. C. A. BUILDING, RICHMOND 



320 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



of war. His service was entirely gratuitous. No one present will ever forget 
the close of this great meeting. During the latter part of Dr. Talrnage's address 
Captain Richmond Pearson Hobson, who had already spoken to over eight hun- 
dred boys at the Young Men's Christian Association Hall, quietly slipped into 
the meeting and took a seat upon the platform. After the invitation and a 
most touching solo by Mr. Haddon S. Watkins, Richmond's sweet tenor, the 
General Secretary introduced Captain Hobson to the audience. He spoke for 
ten or twelve minutes on * Christian Manhood.' The great audience then joined 
with a will in singing ' Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,' and then 

they broke loose : every one seemed to desire 
to get hands on Dr. Talmage and Captain 
Hobson. 

THE MINISTRY OF TEARS 

" Dr. Talmage spoke at the First Pres- 
byterian Church, Rev. Dr. R. P. Kerr, pastor, 
at the night service. Long before the hour 
tin- church was literally jammed with an 
expectant congregation, and they were not 
disappointed. He took for his theme, ' The 
Ministry of Tears,' his text being Revelation 
7:17: 'God shall wipe away, all tears from 
their eves.' It was a most touching and 
helpful discourse; it has seldom been my 
privilege to listen to one that was as much 
so. Xever have I seen a man throw more 
of his own life and heart into a service, and 
he seemed burdened with the care of others, 
and groaned within himself that he might be 
used to help his fellowmen. The stillness of 




SAMUKL KERR MCKEE 
Secretary Richmond Y. M. C. A. 



the closing moments 
earnest." 



was 



something intense, his prayer eloquent and deeply 



PREACHING AT MACON. GA. 

A few days afterward Dr. Talmage started on a trip to the City of Mexico, 
hoping for improvement in his health. He lectured or preached on the way at 
Macon, Georgia; at Charleston, and at New Orleans. The Macon Telegraph 
comments on his visit there, saying: 

" The seventy years that Have passed over his head have not destroyed 
nor have they diminished the power of Rev. T. DeWitt Talrnage's eloquence. 
That he is as gifted on the lecture platform as he is powerful in the pulpit was 
demonstrated to the audience at the Academy of Music last evening, when he 
gave his lecture on Good Cheer. He went from here to New 7 Orleans, and will 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



321 



go from there to Mexico City. Dr. Talmage was in Macon about twenty years 
ago, when he delivered a lecture. He says he remembers the great beauty of 
the resident portion. He saw it then when the flowers were in bloom and the 
trees and the lawns were clothed in green. He saw it this time when nature 
was standing bare to winter's cold, but to him it was yet a beautiful city. He 
went out to Rose Hill Cemetery yesterday afternoon to view the grave of his 
old friend Senator Colquit, for whom he expressed great admiration. Sexton 
Hall showed the distinguished minister many of the important monuments and 





DR. TALMAGE BLESSING THE CARGO OP THE RELIEF SHIP 

An Incident of the Russian Famine Relief Work 



LEO 



graves in the cemetery, and he pronounced it one of the most beautiful cemeteries 
he had ever seen." 

In New Orleans, Dr. Talmage spent the Sabbath, February twenty-third. 
and preached in the morning at the First Presbyterian Church. As this was the 
last discourse that Dr. Talmage delivered in the United States, it is interesting 
to note the description given of the service, and of the great preacher by the 
New Orleans journalists. The Times-Democrat introduced its report with a 
picture of Dr. Talmage in the pulpit, and with a remarkably well-written descrip- 



21 



^22 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



tion of his appearance and manner. This report was followed by the sermon 
in full. The reporter writes : 

" Between ten and eleven o'clock yesterday morning all roads in Xew 
Orleans seemed to lead to the First Presbyterian Church. When the hour of 
eleven arrived the sacred edifice facing Lafayette Square was filled to its utmost 
capacity with an eager, expectant throng of church-goers, who had gathered to 
listen to Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage preach. Such an immense concourse of people 
was never before seen at a regular church service in New Orleans. Dr. Talmage 
established a record so far as church attendances in Xew Orleans are concerned. 

It was such an audience as the great preacher loved to meet — large, enthu- 
siastic, responsive; filled with loving admiration of the speaker whose fame had 







^KWu vli*. 











COTTON PALACE, CHARLESTON 

long been known to them and whose sermons they had read, week after week, for 
a quarter of a century in the columns of the leading Southern newspapers. It 
was such an audience as the cultured South — which delights in really fine 
oratory — loves to assemble in greeting to those who are fitly regarded as supreme 
masters of the art of eloquence in pulpit or on platform. 



A VAST AUDIENCE GREETS HIM 

" Every nook and corner in the First Presbyterian Church was occupied. 
The galleries were packed until the people were almost standing on one another's 
toes. The organ loft contained an immense crowd, there being such a congested 
condition of affairs in that part of the church that it was with great difficulty 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



323 



the members of the choir retained their seats. In the main auditorium the crowd 
surged on to the rostrum, a number of ladies being seated on the platform with 
the pastors. 

" After the hour of eleven those persons who came to the First Presbyterian 
Church expecting to hear Dr. Talmage preach were disappointed. The church 
was filled to every entrance, and it was an utter impossibility to crowd another 
mortal inside. As a result of this condition of affairs, hundreds of persons were 
turned away, unable to gain admittance or even to get within sound of Dr. 
Talmage's resonant voice. The crowds around the First Presbyterian Church 
during the morning services were immense, and furnished unmistakable evidence 
of an unusual occurrence within the edifice. It was a general crush that will 
ever be remembered by those who attempted 
to get within sound of Dr. Talmage's voice. 

A PEN PICTURE OF THE PREACHER 

" A man with a certain hearty manner 
and a fullness of the vest rose in the pulpit 
of the First Presbyterian Church yesterday 
morning and talked to four or five thousand 
people. And he talked to them in a kindly, 
fatherly, wise old way, cheering them with 
the effervescence of an optimism which is so 
broad that nothing can dissipate it, so strong 
that nothing can break it. so genuine that it 
is refreshed by every day's sun as it rises. 

" Dr. Talmage, the lecturer, the racon- 
teur, the companion, is one man. Rev. T. 
DeWitt Talmage is another man. There are 
two in one, and yet none of the Jekyll-and- 
Hyde business, no cloaking of iniquity, 
because there is no iniquity to cloak. But 

pulpits conduce to soberness, to sanctification, to consecration, and, indeed, hard- 
hearted is he who does not feel emotion of an original kind when he stands in the 
shadow of the Cross to speak the words which are written in the chronicles of 
ages. 

A FASCINATED MULTITUDE 

" Something of an actor, an unconscious histrionist, something of an elocu- 
tionist, and always a great orator, Dr. Talmage arrests and holds the attention 
of every person fortunate enough to get within the range of his voice. 

" A tall man, a well-formed man, a figure which tends to portliness, to 
embonpoint, with the garb of a clergyman, with an eye which the frosts of nearly 
seventy-five winters have not dimmed, an imposing man, rose from a seat beside 




NEW ORLEANS WAIFS HOME 



$24 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Dr. Palmer, the venerable father of the flock, and began the invocation, ' Oh, 

Lord,' in a voice which rang through the building as musket butts ring on 

the flags, a voice of sweetness and appeal which reached every nook and corner 
of the great structure, and which was still the voice of the church militant. The 
voice of defiance and victory, the voice of the man who has that faith which 
looks beyond graves and things like that to a future of peace. The voice is 
clear, marvelously clear, with a range and vitality which make it understandable 
at great distances ; one of those voices given to few men, which combine strength 
and sweetness, battle and peace. 

AN ELOQUENT PRAYER 

" So the vast audience hung on the first words of the prayer. Those in that 
audience heard a tone which awakened memories of days long ago dead and 
gone, and the plea, the eloquent petition for mercy, the strenuous, insistent invo- 
cation for a moment blinded their eyes to the present surroundings, to the gray 
predominance in the color scheme of the church frescoes, and made them dream 
of palaces not builded with hands, of regions far beyond the serene and shining 
stars. 

" First of all the voice. From the time he opened his lips, from the time 
the first sound was emitted, the audience heard only the cadences of the voice. 
But when his hearers had time to recover from the spell and look at the man 
they saw an elderly gentleman, a man who does not look his age by twenty 
years, with a becoming coronet of gray hair, the face of a warrior with a sort 
of tender shading around the eyes, the token of charity and benevolence and 
inveterate good humor, which is one of the marks of the man. There is 
humor, too, in the face, good, honest, wholesome, healthy, sane appreciation of 
the good things of life, good living, right thinking, decent observance of cus- 
toms and convention which enable a man to face the world with unblanched cheek 



and unfaltering faith. 



HIS SPEECH AND GESTURES 



" There is a great deal of the Scotchman in the good Doctor, the kind of 
paradoxical characteristic which was displayed in the Highlander who would 
not have a fire in the cook-stove on the Sabbath because it was against the law 
of the Covenant, but who built a fire in the bedroom because the temperature 
was low. The preacher and the humorist are a rare combination, especially in 
the ranks of some sects, but a preacher and a humorist and an actor is a rarer 
combination still, and Dr. Talmage is all of these, and the combination is so 
blended, so harmonious, that it makes a delightful personality, a charming char- 
acter, an evenly-balanced individual who takes his communion with a clear con- 
science, and laughs at the jests of his friend at the dinner. 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



325 



" Dr. Talmage is eloquent not only in speech, but in gesture. When he 
says ' that good old woman will get her reward because she taught Christianity 
to the son,' his folded hands, the reach and sweep of the extended palms carry 
the idea of peace, of the satisfaction of the mother, of the gratification of the 
mother over the success of her son. There is histrionic ability, rare dramatic 
insight, the artistic touch here, but it is so thoroughly unaffected, so unpremedi- 
tated, that it charms as much as the spoken word, supplements the climax of 
the story with just the delicacy of feeling which is needed. And so when he 
raised his trembling hands 
in impassioned appeal for 
the blessing of God on 'all 
the ordinary people who 
are attending to the ordi- 
nary duties of life in the 
ordinary way,' all those 
within the sound of his 
voice felt a thrill, felt that 
though they are the rela- 
tive sharers and clerks of 
the world, they were doing 
a duty which will be re- 
warded in proportion to 
the way they improve 
their opportunities. He 
has argumentative hands, 
the Doctor — hands which 
speak for him, which have 
been educated to some- 
thing more than to carry 
food to the mouth. 

"Eyes, too, great, 
grave eyes, which look out 
on the world fearlessly 
and openly. Eyes which 
speak a language of their 
own, which flash and spar- 
kle when the Doctor says, 
' wrinkles are not the signs 
of age; they are battle 
scars,' and which grow 
soft and tender when he 
says, * and all these bless- The convalescent home, new Orleans 




326 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

ings and all these hopes come from the mother's knee at the fireside ' ; eyes of 
comfort or encouragement, as the words may come. 

" All in all, Dr. Talmage is a pleasing personality. The gentleness, the 
kindliness, the vigor and the strength which he has, a wonderful way of under- 
standing the human heart and of reaching it and inspiring it, a grace of carriage 
which cannot be attained by study or imitation, a range of information which 
takes in its scope almost everything between the poles, charity which forgives 
and pardons, and a way of appealing to all that is good in men and women, 
®f reviving ideals dusty and long since forgotten, of raising hopes almost dead, 
and of making men and women glad they have seen him, glad they have heard 
him, and that his words have made them better for having been in his presence." 

HIS LAST SERMON TO AN AMERICAN AUDIENCE 

The sermon in New Orleans, the last the great preacher was to deliver in 
kis native land, was on the subject of " Garrison Duty," from the text, I. Samuel, 
30:24 "As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that 
tarrieth by the stuff." 

The preacher spoke as follows : 

" If you have never seen an army change quarters you have no idea of the 
amount of baggage — twenty loads, fifty loads, a hundred loads of baggage. 
David and his army were about to start on a double-quick march for the recovery 
of their captured families from the Amalekites. So they left by the brook Besor 
their blankets, their knapsacks, their baggage, and their carriages. Who shall 
be detailed to watch this stuff? There are sick soldiers and wounded soldiers 
and aged soldiers who are not able to go on this swift military expedition, but 
who are able to do some work, and so they are detailed to watch the baggage. 
There is many a soldier who is not strong enough to march thirty miles in a 
day, and then plunge into a ten hours' fight, who is able with drawn sword lifted 
against his shoulder to pace up and down as a sentinel to keep off an enemy who 
might put the torch to the baggage. There are two hundred of these crippled 
and aged and wounded soldiers detailed to watch the baggage. Some of them, 
I suppose, had bandages across the brow, and some of them had their arms in 
slings, and some of them walked on crutches. They were not cowards shirking 
duty. They had fought in many a fierce battle for their country and their God. 
They are now part of the time in hospital, and part of the time on garrison duty. 
They almost cry because they cannot go with the other troops to the front. While 
these sentinels watch the baggage, the Lord watches the sentinels. 

A MILITARY CAROUSAL 

" There is quite a different scene being enacted in the distance. The Amale- 
kites, having ravaged and ransacked and robbed whole countries, are celebrating 
their success in a roaring carousal. Some of them are dancing on the lawn with 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



327 



wonderful gyration of heel and toe, and some of them are examining the spoils 
of victory — the finger rings and earrings, the necklaces, the wristlets, the head- 
bands diamond starred, and the coffers with coronets and cornelians and pearls 
and sapphires and emeralds, and all the wealth of plate and jewels and decanters, 
and the silver and the gold banked up on the earth in princely profusion, and 
the embroideries and the robes and the turbans and the cloaks of an imperial 
wardrobe. The banquet has gone on until the banqueters are maudlin and weak 
and stupid and indecent and loathsomely drunk. What a time it is now for David 
and his men to swoop on them! So the English lost the battle of Bannock- 
burn, because the night before they were in wassail and bibulous celebration, 
while the Scotch were in prayer. So the Syrians were overthrown in their 
carousal by the Israelites. So Chedorlaomer and his army were overthrown in 




OUTDOOR SHOEMAKER, FRENCH QUARTER, NEW ORLEANS 



328 T. DE WITT TAEMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

their carousal by Abraham and his men. So our Northern forces were defeated 
in a battle because one of the commanders was drunk. Now is the time for 
David and his men to swoop upon these carousing Amalekites. Some of the 
Amalekites are hacked to pieces on the spot, some of them are just able to go 
staggering and hiccoughing off the field, some of them crawl on camels and speed 
off in the distance. 

" David and his men gather together the wardrobes, the jewels, and put 
them upon the backs of camels, and into wagons, and they gather together the 
sheep and cattle that had been stolen, and start back toward the garrison. 

" Yonder they come ! yonder they come ! The limping men of the garrison 
come out and greet them with cheer. The Bible says David saluted them. That 
is, he asked them how they all were. ' How is your broken arm ? ' ' How is 
your fractured jaw 7 ?' 'Has the stiffened limb been untimbered ? ' 'Have you 
had another chill ? ' ' Are you getting better ? ' He saluted them. 

A SYMPATHETIC DISTRIBUTION 

" But now came a very difficult thing, the distribution of the spoils of victory. 
Drive up those laden camels now. Who shall have the spoils? Well, some selfish 
souls suggest that these treasures ought all to belong to those who had been out 
in active service. ' We did all the fighting, while these men stayed at home in 
the garrison, and we ought to have all the treasures.' But David looked into 

the worn faces of these veterans who had stayed in the 

SBBBM garrison, and he looked around and saw how cleanly 

JmBM everything had been kept, and he saw that the baggage 

: was all safe, and he knew how that these wounded and 

_. crippled men would gladly enough have been at the front 

if they had been able, and the little general looks up 

from under his helmet and says : ' No, no ; let us have 

fair play ;' and he rushes up to one of these men and he 

.j I says, ' Hold your hands together,' and the hands are 

H held together, and he fills them with silver. And he 

j I rushes up to another man who was sitting away back 

4 |-} and had no idea of getting any of the spoils, and throws 

|BjBf| a Babylonish garment over him and fills his hand with 

Sm J gold. And he rushes up to another man who had lost 

all his property in serving God and his country years 

before, and he drives up some of the cattle and some of 

the sheep that they had brought back from the Amalek- 

i. 1 1 ites, and he gives two or three of the cattle and three 

^gjl •- or four of the sheep to this poor man, so he shall always 

=*^— — be fed and clothed. He sees a man so emaciated and 

a Mexican storm-coat worn out and sick he needs stimulants and he gives him 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



329 



a little of the wine that he brought from the Amalekites. Yonder is a man who 
has no appetite for the rough rations of the army, and he gives him a rare morsel 
from the Amalekitish banquet, and the two hundred crippled and maimed and 
aged soldiers who tarried on garrison duty get just as much of the spoils of battle 
as any of the two hundred men that went to the front ' As his part is that goeth 
down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff.' 

" The impression is abroad that the Christian rewards are for those who do 
conspicuous service in distinguished places — great martyrs, great patriots, great 
preachers, great philanthropists. But my text sets forth the idea that there is 
just as much reward for a man who stays at home and minds his own business, 
and who, crippled and unable to go forth 
and lead in great movements and in the 
high places of the earth, does his whole 
duty just where he is. Garrison duty is 
as important and as remunerative as ser- 
vice at the front. ' As his part is that 
goeth down to the battle, so shall his part 
be that tarrieth by the stuff.' 

A NOBLE EARL'S DESIRE 

" The Earl of Kintore said to me on 
an English railway : ' Mr. Talmage, 
when you get back to America I want 
you to preach a sermon on the discharge 
of ordinary duty in ordinary places, and 
then send me a copy of it. Afterward 
an English clergyman coming to this land 
brought from the Earl of Kintore the 
same message. Alas ! that before I got 
ready to do what he asked me to do, 
the good Earl of Kintore had departed 
this life. But that man, surrounded by 
all palatial surroundings and in a dis- 
tinguished sphere, felt sympathetic with those who had ordinary duties to per- 
form in ordinary places and in ordinary ways. A great many people are 
discouraged when they hear the story of Moses and of Joshua and of David 
and of Luther and of John Knox and of Deborah and of Florence Nightingale. 
They say : ' Oh, that was all good and right for them, but I shall never be called 
to receive the law on Mount Sinai, I shall never be called to command the sun 
and the moon to stand still, I shall never be called to slay a giant, I shall never 
preach on Mars' Hill, I shall never defy the Diet of Worms, I shall never be 
called to make a queen tremble for her crimes, I shall never preside over 3 
hospital.' 




MEXICAN VENDER 



33° 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



" There are women who say : ' If I had as brilliant a sphere as those people 
had, I should be as brave and as grand ; but my business is to get the children 
off to school, and to hunt up things when they are lost, and to see that dinner is 
ready, and to keep account of the household expenses, and to hinder the children 
from being strangulated by the whooping cough, and to go through all the annoy- 
ances and vexations of housekeeping. Oh, my sphere is so infinitesimal and so 
insignificant, I am clear discouraged.' Woman, God places you on garrison 
duty, and your reward will be just as great as that of Florence Nightingale, who. 
moving so often night by night with a light in her hand through the hospitals, 
was called by the wounded the ' lady of the lamp.' Your reward will be just 
as great as that of Mrs. Hertzog, who built and indorsed theological seminary 
buildings. Your reward will be just as great as that of Hannah Moore, who 
by her excellent books won for her admirers Garrick and Edmund Burke and 
Joshua Reynolds. Rewards are not to be given according to the amount of 
noise you make in the world, nor even according to the amount of good you do, 
but according to whether you work to your full capacity, according to whether 
or not you do your full duty in the sphere where God has placed you. 

TWO-TALENT MEN 

" Suppose you give to two of your children errands and they are to go off 
to make purchases, and to one you give one dollar and to the other you give 
twenty dollars. Do you reward the boy to whom you gave twenty dollars for 
purchasing more with that amount of money than the other boy purchased 
with one dollar? Of course not. If God give wealth or social position or elo- 
quence or twenty times the faculty to a man that he gives to the ordinary men, 
is he going to give to the favored man a reward because he has more power 
and more influence? Oh, no! In other words, if you and I do our whole duty, 
and you have twenty times more talent than 1 have, you will get no more divine 
reward than I will. Is Ciod going to reward you because he gave you more? 
That would not be fair, that would not be right. These two hundred men of the 
text who fainted by the brook Besor did their whole duty : they watched the bag- 
gage, they took care of the stuff, and they got as much of the spoils of victory 
as the men who went to the front. ' As his part is that goeth down to the bat- 
tle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff; 

" There is high encouragement in this for all who have great responsibility 
and little credit for what they do. You know the names of the great commercial 
houses of these cities. Do you know the names of the confidential clerks — the 
men who have the key to the ?afe. the men who know the combination of the 
lock? A distinguished merchant goes forth at the summer watering place and 
he flashes past, and you say : ' Who is that ? ' ' Oh,' replies some one, ' don't 
you know? That is the great importer, that is the great banker, that is the 
great manufacturer.' The confidential clerk has his week off. Nobody notices 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



33i 




GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ, PRKSID^NT OF MEXICO 
Whom Dr\ Talmage Met in Mexico While on His Last Gospel Tour 



332 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

whether he comes or goes. Nobody knows him, and after a while his week is 
done, and he sits down again at his desk. But God will reward his fidelity just 
as much as he recognizes the work of the merchant philanthropist whose invest- 
ments this unknown clerk so carefully guarded. Hudson River Railroad, Penn- 
sylvania Railroad, Erie Railroad, New York and New Haven Railroad — busi- 
ness men know the names of the presidents of these roads and of the prominent 
directors ; but they do not know the names of the engineers, the names of the 
switchmen, the names of the flagmen, the names of the brakemen. These men 
have awful responsibilities, and sometimes, through the recklessness of an engi- 
neer, or the unfaithfulness of a switchman, it has brought to mind the faithful- 
ness of nearly all the rest of them. Such men do not have recognition of their 
services. They have small wages and much complaint. I very often ride upon 
locomotives, for I like engineers, and riding on the locomotive you seem to get 
there sooner, and I ask the question, as we shoot around some curve, or under 
some ledge of rocks, ' How much wages do you receive ? ' and I am always sur- 
prised to find how little for such vast responsibility. Do you not suppose God 
is going to recognize that fidelity? Thomas Scott, the president of the Pennsyl- 
vania Railway, going up at death to receive from God his destiny, was no better 
known in that hour than was known the brakeman who last night on the Erie 
Railroad was jammed to death amid the car coupling. ' As his part is that goeth 
down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff.' 

UNSEEN SERVICE IN A STORM 

" Once, for thirty-six hours, we expected every moment to go to the bottom 
of the ocean. The waves struck through the skylights and rushed down into 
the hold of the ship and hissed against the boilers. It was an awful time ; but 
by the blessing of God and the faithfulness of the men in charge we came out 
of the cyclone and we arrived at home. Each one before leaving the ship thanked 
Captain Andrews. I do not think there was a man or woman that went off that 
ship without thanking Captain Andrews, and when years after I heard of his 
death I was impelled to write a letter of condolence to his family in Liverpool. 
Everybody recognized the goodness, the courage, the kindness of Captain 
Andrews; but it occurs to me now that we never thanked the engineer. He 
stood away down in the darkness amid the hissing furnaces doing his whole duty. 
Nobody thanked the engineer, but God recognized his heroism and his fidelity, 
and there will be just as high reward for the engineer who worked out of sight 
as the captain who stood on the bridge of the ship in the midst of the howling 
tempest. ' As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that 
tarrieth by the stuff.' 

" A Christian woman was seen going along the edge of a wood every even- 
tide, and the neighbors in the country did not understand how a mother with so 
many cares and anxieties should waste so much time as to be idly sauntering 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 



333 



out evening by evening. It was found out afterward that she went there to 
pray for her household, and while there one evening she wrote that beautiful 
hymn, famous in all ages for cheering Christian hearts : 

' I love to steal a while away 

From every cumbering care, 
And spend the hours of setting day 
In humble, grateful prayer.' 

Shall there be no reward for such unpretending yet everlasting service? 

HOME SACRIFICES 

" Clear back in the country there is a boy who wants to go to college and 
get an education. They call him a bookworm. Whenever they find him — in 
the barn or in the house — he is reading a book. ' What a pity it is,' they say, 
' that Ed cannot get an education.' His father, work as hard as he will, can no 
more than support the family by the product of the farm. One night Ed has 
retired to his room and there is a family conference about him. The sisters say : 
' Father, I wish you would send Ed to college ; if you will, we will work harder 
than we ever did, and we will make our old dresses do.' The mother says : ' Yes, 
I will get along without any hired help ; although I am not as strong as I used 
to be, I think I can get along without any hired help.' The father says : ' Well, 




A MEXICAN STREET MARKET SCENE 



334 1*. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

I think by husking corn nights I can get along without any assistance.' Sugar 
is banished from the table, butter is banished from the plate. That family is 
put down on rigid, yea, suffering economy, that the boy may go to college. 

" Time passes on. Commencement Day has come. Think not that I men- 
tion an imaginary case. God knows it happened. Commencement Day has come, 
and the professors walk in on the stage in their long gowns. The interest of 
the occasion is passing on, and after a while it comes to a climax of interest as 
the valedictorian is to be introduced. Ed has studied so hard and worked so 
well that he has had the honor conferred upon him. There are rounds of applause, 
sometimes breaking into vociferation. It is a great day for Ed. But away back 
in the galleries are his sisters in their plain hats and their faded shawls, and 
the old-fashioned father and mother — dear me, she has not had a new hat for 
six years, he has not had a new coat for six years — and they get up and look over 
on the platform, and they laugh and they cry. and they sit down, and they look 
pale, and then they are very much flushed. Ed gets the garlands, and the old- 
fashioned group in the gallery have their full share of the triumph. They have 
made that scene possible, and in the day when God shall more fully reward self- 
sacrifices made for others, he will give grand and glorious recognition. ' As his 
part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth bv the 
stuff.' 

PENSIONED VETERANS 

" There is high encouragement in this subject also for those who once 
wrought mightily for Christ and the church, but through sickness or collapse 
of fortune or advanced years cannot now go to the front. These two hundred 
men of the text were veterans. Let that man bare his arm and show how the 
muscles were torn. Let him pull aside the turban and see the mark of a battle- 
axe. Pull aside the coat and see where the spear thrust him. Would it have 
been fair for those men, crippled, weak and old, by the brook Besor, to have 
no share in the spoils of triumph ? I was in the soldiers' hospital in Paris and 
I saw there some of the men of the First Napoleon, and 1 asked them where they 
had fought under their great commander. One man said, ' I was at Austerlitz.' 
Another man said, ' I was at the Pyramids.' Another man said. ' I was in the 
awful retreat from Moscow.' Another man said. ' I was at the bridge of Lodi.' 
Some of them were lame, they were all aged. Did the French Government turn 
off those old soldiers to die in want ? No : their last days were spent like princes. 

" Do you think my Lord is going to turn off his old soldiers because they 
are weak and worn, and because they fainted by the brook Besor? Are they 
going to get no part of the spoils of the victory? Just look at them. Do you 
think those crevices in the face are wrinkles? No; they are battle scars. They 
fought against sickness, they fought against trouble, they fought against sin. 
they fought for God, they fought for the church, they fought for the truth, they 
fought for Heaven. When they had plenty of money their names were always 






HiS CLOSING MINISTRY 



335 



on the subscription list. When there was any hard work to be done for God, 
they were ready to take the heaviest part of it. When there came a great revival, 
they were ready to pray all night for the anxious and the sin-struck. They 
were ready to do any work, endure any sacrifices, do the most unpopular thing 
that God demanded of them. But now they cannot go further. Now they have 
physical infirmities, now their heads trouble them. They are weak and faint by 
the brook Besor. Are they to have no share in the triumph? Are they to get 
none of the treasures, none of the spoils of conquest? Yon must think that Christ 
has a very short memory if you think he has forgotten their services. 

" Fret not, ye aged ones. Just tarry by the stuff and wait for your share 
of the spoils. Yonder they are coming. I hear the bleating of the fat lambs 




MEXICAN PEASANT HOUSEWIFE MAKING TORTIELAS 



and I see the jewels glint in the sun. It makes me laugh to think how you will 
be surprised when they throw a chain of gold over your neck, and tell you to 
go in and dine with the King. I see you backing out because you feel unworthy. 
The shining ones come up on the one side, and the shining ones come up on the 
other side, and they push you on and they push you up, and they say, ' Here is 
an old soldier of Jesus Christ,' and the shining ones will rush out toward you and 
say, ' Yes, that man saved my soul,' or they will rush oat and say, ' Oh, yes, she 
was with me in the last sickness.' And then the cry will go 'round the circle. 
' Come in, come in, come up, come up ; we saw you away down there, old and 
sick and decrepit and discouraged because you could not go away down there, 



336 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 



but ' As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tar- 
rieth by the stuff.' 

HEROES OF THE PULPIT 

" There is high consolation in this for aged ministers. They sit in pews 
in our churches. They used to stand in pulpits. Their hair is white with the 
blossoms of the tree of life. Their names marked on the roll of the General 
Assembly, or of the consociation, ' Emeritus.' They sometimes hear a text 




ACADEMY OF MUSIC, RICHMOND, VA. 



announced which brings to mind a sermon they preached fifty years ago on that 
same subject. They preached more Gospel on four hundred dollars a year than 
some of their successors preach on four thousand dollars. Some Sunday the 
old minister is in a church and near by in another pew there is a husband and 
a wife and a row of children. And after the benediction the lady comes up and 
says, 'Doctor, you don't know me. do you?' 'Well,' he says, 'your face is 
familiar, but I cannot call you by name.' ' Why,' she says, ' you baptized me 



HIS CLOSING MINISTRY 337 

and you married me and you buried my father and mother and sisters.' ' Oh, 
yes/ he says ; ' my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be.' 

" They are in all our churches — the heroes of i860, the heroes of 1870, the 
heroes of 1880. By the long grave trench that cut through half a century, they 
have stood sounding the resurrection. They have been in more Balaklavas and 
have taken more Sebastopols than you eA^er heard of. Sometimes they get a 
little fretful because they cannot be at the front. They hear the sound of the 
battle and the old war horse champs his bit. But the eighty thousand ministers 
of religion this day standing in the brunt of the fray shall have no more reward 
than those retired veterans. ' My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and 
the horsemen thereof/ ' As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall 
his part be that tarrieth by the stuff.' " 

The close of the discourse, which was of more than usual power, produced 
an impression never to be forgotten by those who heard it. Dr. Talmage, who 
all his life, had preached the Gospel of Good Cheer, concluded with this 
eloquent and comforting application: 

MATERNAL CONSECRATION 

" Cheer up, men and women of unappreciated services ; you will get your 
reward — if not here, hereafter. When Charles Wesley comes up to judgment, 
and the thousands of souls which were wafted into glory through his songs shall 
be enumerated, he will take his throne. Then John Wesley will come up to judg- 
ment, and after his name has been mentioned in connection with the salvation of 
the millions of souls brought to God through the Methodism which he founded, 
he will take his throne. But between the two thrones of Charles Wesley, and 
John Wesley there will be a throne higher than either, on which shall sit Susannah 
Wesley, who, with maternal consecration in Epworth rectory, Lincolnshire, Eng- 
land, started those two souls on their triumphant mission of sermon and song 
through all ages. Oh, what a day that will be for many who rocked Christian 
cradles with weary foot, and out of a small income made the children comfort- 
able for the winter. What a day that will be for those to whom the world gave 
the cold shoulder and called them nobodies, and begrudged them the least recog- 
nition, and who, weary and worn and sick, fainted by the brook Besor. Oh, 
that will be a mighty day when ' the son of David' shall distribute the crowns, 
the thrones, the sceptres, the dominions. Then you and I will appreciate as 
never before the height, the breadth, the columned, the domed magnificence of 
my text : 'As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that 
tarrieth by the stuff.' Hallelujah ! Amen ! " 

22 



THE LAST OF EARTH 




DR. TAEMAGE, PROSTRATED IN MEXICO, RETURNS TO WASHINGTON TO DIE — THE 
CLOSING SCENES IN THE GREAT PREACHERS CAREER HIS TlWERAL IN WASH- 
INGTON — A MEMORABLE GATHERING — THE INTERMENT IN GREENWOOD 



FTER leaving the scene of his greatest Southern Gospel triumph in Xew 
Orleans, Dr. Talmage, accompanied by his wife and his physician, 
proceeded to the city of Mexico. He had not been in his usual 
robust health for sometime past, and it was hoped that the Southern 
journey would tone and invigorate his system and enable him to 
continue his labors. This hope, however, was doomed to disappoint- 
ment. He arrived in Mexico City safely, though fatigued by the journey and 
the severe labors he had undergone. 

In Mexico City he had an opportunity to renew his former acquaintance with 
Gen. Porfirio Diaz, the President of the Mexican Republic. He enjoyed a long 
audience with the soldier-statesman, during which the mutual interests and pros- 
pects of the two countries were freely discussed. President Diaz showing himself, 
as always, a warm friend and admirer of our government and people. He also 
met and renewed acquaintance with other men of prominence. 

STRICKEN IN MEXICO CITY 

His intention was to preach and lecture in the Mexican capital ; but shortly 
after his arrival he had premonition of an attack from his old enemy, the grip. 
He gave these warnings little heed. In a few days, they became more pro- 
nounced, and one morning, after a restless night, he found himself a thoroughly 
sick man. An American doctor in Mexico City, who was called, perceived 
symptoms of serious cerebral congestion and advised his removal to Washington. 
As every hour seemed to aggravate his condition, his wife and friends prepared 
for the homeward journey, which was begun without delay. 

He was still quite ill when he reached Washington and was conveyed to his 
home at No. 1400 Massachusetts Avenue, where, under Dr. G. Lloyd Magruder's 
careful treatment, he apparently began to improve. The rally, however, was 
delusive. 

338 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



339 



WATCHED BY A NATION 

During his illness hundreds of telegrams and letters of inquiry were received 
at his home in Washington from all parts of the country, and some even from 
distant lands. These messages of kindly interest poured in upon Mrs. Talmage 
in such numbers that to reply to all became impossible. They showed how deep, 
widespread and genuine was the love that glowed in countless hearts for the 
famous preacher, for whose recovery fervent petitions were being offered up 
throughout the length and breadth of the Union. 

Each day brought its alternate hopes and fears. Much of the time was 
passed in unconsciousness; but there were intervals when, even amid his suffer- 
ings, he could speak to and recognize those around him. The cerebral trouble was 
now attended by fever and great general weakness. No murmur or complaint 
came from the patient's lips ; he bore his suffering bravely, sustained by a Higher 
Power. The message had come which sooner or later comes to all, and the aged 
servant of God was ready to go; he had been ready all his life. 




Copyright, 1902, Abby G. Baker 

funeral, cortege; leaving dr. tal,mage's Washington residence: 



340 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



Occasional rallies took place, raising hopes which were quickly abandoned. 
From April 5 to 12 these rallies occurred at frequent intervals, always followed 
by a condition of increased depression, more or less augmented fever and partial 
unconsciousness. 

THE LAST SCENE OF ALL 

On Saturday, April 12, a great change became apparent. On the previous 
evening there had been a slight improvement, and the doctors, at the morning 
consultation, were gratified to note that this had continued, although they declined 
to encourage expectations of recovery. The last day of Dr. Talmage's life passed 
as the two preceding days had passed. The patient was simply dying. His 
vitality was ebbing away. The congestion of the brain grew out of an effusion, 
or accumulation of fluid, the pressure of which caused a deadening of sensibili- 
ties. Several days before, Dr. Magruder had called for assistance upon Dr. A. B. 
Richardson, a specialist in brain troubles, and it was hoped he might be able to 




Copyright, iqo2, Abby G. Baker 
THE FAMILY LEAVING THE HOUSE FOR TFIE CHURCH 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



34* 



administer treatment which would bring relief. All he could do, however, was 
to direct Dr. Magruder in methods calculated to make the patient comfortable. 
He saw that there was no chance for ultimate recovery. About the same time 
the services of Dr. C. W. Richardson were requested. The latter is a specialist 
in affections of the throat and nose. His services were sought in the hope he 
could relieve the troublesome conditions arising from the severe attack of catarrh. 
He, too, endeavored to make Dr. Talmage" s last hours pass with as little pain as 
possible. 

The change came on that Saturday forenoon. For many hours the patient 
had been unconscious. As the day wore on, it became evident that he could not 
live through another night. All of Dr. Talmage's family, his wife, his son, the 
Rev. Frank DeWitt Talmage, of Chicago; Mrs. Warren G. Smith and Mrs. 
Daniel Mangam, of Brooklyn; Mrs. Allen E. Donnan, of Richmond; and Mrs. 
Clarence Wykcoff and Miss Talmage, were gathered in the chamber of death. 
Dr. G. L. Magruder, the principal physician, was also in attendance. 

The loved ones gathered around the bed on which the great preacher lay, 
and soothed his last moments with kind ministrations. It was a scene too sacred 




Copyright, 

IQ02, 

Abby 
G. Baker 



REMOVING THE CASKET FROM THE TALMAGE HOME 



342 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

to be described. At 9.25 o'clock p. m. the soul took flight from the inanimate 
clay, and the spirit of the world's greatest preacher was released. 

As Dr. Talmage's life ebbed away, the Rev. Dr. T. Chalmers Easton, who 
stood near the weeping family, lifted his voice in consolatory prayer. The end 
was peaceful and without the slightest shadow of pain. 

TOKENS OF SYMPATHY 

Early the next morning (Sunday) messengers began to call at the Talmage 
home, and during the entire day words of sympathy were received from the 
friends of the lamented minister and his family in all parts of the world. Cable- 
grams came from men and women who met Dr. Talmage in his trips to foreign 
countries. From England, Russia, and other European countries came messages 
of condolence. And nearly every State in the Union was represented in the 
telegrams which came from friends whom Dr. Talmage met in his long years 
of religious activity. Few men in America had as wide an acquaintance as 
Dr. Talmage. He traveled so extensively that his friends were not confined to 
any particular locality, and his activity was not restricted to church circles. 
Laymen joined with the clergy in expressing their sorrow at the death of the 
eminent preacher. 

During the day many called at the home to express their sympathy. The 
pastors of most of the Presbyterian churches of Washington and a large number 
of the members of the First Presbyterian Church, of which Dr. Talmage was 
formerly pastor, were among those who went to the home and assisted the family 
in arranging for the last sad rites over the great religious leader. 

On April 15, the funeral services took place in Washington. Seldom has 
a more distinguished throng ever assembled than that which attended the 
obsequies of the great preacher, whose eloquent voice was never more to be 
heard in Gospel proclamation. In the Church of the Covenant, where the 
services were held, one could not gaze upon the sad faces of the multitude that 
crowded the spacious edifice without being impressed with the feeling that 
they were men and women who had loved and esteemed the teacher, whose eye 
would never more kindle in greeting, and whose lips would no longer utter 
those words of power they had so often thronged to hear. Thousands on the 
sidewalk attempted in vain to gain entrance to the already crowded church, 
and long before 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the hour set for the service, the 
street was well-nigh impassable. 

As the funeral procession, led by the Rev. Teunis S. Hamlin, entered the 
church, to the slow and solemn strains of the " Dead March," the audience sat 
with heads bowed reverently. The honorary pall bearers who followed the 
casket were: Mr. Justice Harlan, Mr. Justice Brewer, Senator Dolliver. Sena- 
tor Burrows, Senator Cullom, ex-Secretary John W. Foster, Mr. B. H. Warner. 
Rev. Dr. Bittinger, Dr ? G. L. Magmder," Rev. Dr. Fiske, Mr. E. M. Branch, 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



343 



Mr. F. M. Lawrence, and Dr. Louis Klopsch, of New York City. The casket 
was followed by the Talmage family. Mrs. Talmage, leaning upon the arm of 
Rev. Frank DeWitt Talmage, of Chicago ; Mr. and Mrs. Clarence L. Wyckoff ; 
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Mangam, New York City ; Mr. and Mrs. Allen E. Donnan, 
Richmond, Va ; Mr. and Mrs. Warren G. Smith, Brooklyn, N. Y., and Miss 
Talmage, of Washington. 

LYING AMID THE FLOWERS 

There was a great wealth of beautiful flowers heaped up in fragrant pro- 
fusion on and about the chancel rail, many of them being large pieces of 
exquisite design. President and Mrs. Roosevelt sent a great wreath of lilies. 
A cushion of English violets studded the lid of the casket. 

There was no funeral sermon, the services consisting of music and addresses. 
Rev. Dr. Hamlin officiated, assisted by the Rev. Thomas Chalmers Easton, 




Copyright, 1902, Abby G. Baker 
PAIX-BEARERS COMING FROM THE TALMAGE; RESIDENCE, WASHINGTON 



344 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

pastor of the Eastern Presbyterian Church, Washington, lifelong friend of Dr. 
Talmage; Rev. J. S. T. Niccols, of St. Louis; Rev. Dr. Howard Suydam, of 
Rhinebeck, N. Y. ; Rev. Dr. Van Dyke, of Princeton, N. J. ; Rev. James Dema- 
rest, of Brooklyn, N. Y., and the Rev. D. E. P. Terhune. 

When the casket was opened, and the family and the pall-bearers were 
seated, the choir sang, " Lead, Kindly Light," and the Rev. Dr. Hamlin read 
the Presbyterian funeral service. On concluding, he paid a noble tribute to 
the character and work of Dr. Talmage. He said: 

REV. DH. TEVNIS HAMLIN'S ADDRESS 

" For more than a third of a century Dr. Talmage has been one of the best 
known Americans ; one of the very few American clergymen with an inter- 
national reputation. His voice has been heard by the greatest audiences of 
that period that have gathered to listen to preaching. His sermons have been 
more widely read than any others not excepting Mr. Beecher's and Mr. Spur- 
geon's. In volumes, and especially in their syndicated form in the daily press, 
they have every week reached the English-speaking world, and they have been 
translated into many languages of both Europe and Asia. 

" Their charm for this vast popular audience lay largely in their marvelous 
word-pictures. In this quality Dr. Talmage was at once a genius and a poet. 
His brilliant and resourceful imagination seemed exhaustless, and by its aid he 
made spiritual things real to both reader and hearer. 

" But he was also an orator of unquestionable power. He was rich in 
'human sympathy; in the ability to apprehend the joys and sorrows of his fel- 
low-men, and to bring home to them the consolations of the Gospel. The 
notes of hope were never lacking. He spoke to the hearts and emotions 
rather than to the intellects of men ; and their affections responded to his call 

DR.. TALMAGE'S MINISTRY 

" These are the open secrets of his phenomenal popularity and success as 
a preacher. He recognized both his power and its limitations; and did not 
attempt to be pastor, organizer, administrator, or ecclesiastic. While not a 
theologian, nor in any professed way a scholar, he was both a close observer 
and an omnivorous reader; and he constantly surprised and delighted his 
hearers with the range of his information. His sermons were thus illuminated 
by innumerable illustrations, and all of the sort that the plain man and woman 
can understand and appreciate. And while rhetorical and dramatic to the high- 
est degree, they were also practical ; and countless hearers and readers join in 
the testimony that no doubt every one of us has given or heard since his 
death : ' Dr. Talmage has comforted and cheered me ; has made me happier, 
braver and better.' 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



345 



OF THE OLD DUTCH STOCK 

'■' His qualifications for this great work were both natural and acquired. 
Born and reared on a farm, of fine Dutch stock, he had a massive frame, 
robust health, immense capacity for work. And his industry was indefatigable. 
He never spared himself. His enthusiasm was equal to his physical powers 
and remained unabated up to and beyond his three-score years and ten. He 
was carefully prepared for college ; stood well in the University of New York ; 
had three years' legal training; a full course in the Seminary at New Bruns- 
wick; and early showed oratorical powers that later brought him fame. His 
pastorates of three years each at Belleville, N. J., and Syracuse, N. Y., were 
not especially notable. But in the Second Reformed Dutch Church of Phila- 




Copyright, 

IQ02, 

Abby 
G. Baker 



the; church of the covenant, Washington, d. c. 



346 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

delphia he soon found himself. He impressed that city, and thence speedily 
gained a national reputation. In Brooklyn, with sharp-tongued neighbors like 
Beecher, Storrs and Cuyler, he speedily made his own place as a messen- 
ger to the people, and held it practically uncontested. And from that coign of 
vantage he addressed the world. His work as editor was scarcely literary, but 
rather an adjunct to his preaching. Whatever he printed was substantially 
sermonic. He was first, last, and always a preacher. 

" Most of us who are gathered here knew and loved Dr. Talmage as a 
friend. We think of him at this hour, and shall remember him, as a genial, 
kind neighbor; a considerate and helpful companion. His fine optimism made 
him welcome in every social circle. His delightful humor, which never had a 
sting; his fund "of story and anecdote; his unaffected legard of those around 
him won him wide and loyal friendship. Multitudes from many lands came to 
his bier with their admiration and gratitude; in these tributes we join, and to 
them we add as his neighbors and friends our unfeigned love." 

REV. DR. DEMAREST'S EULOGIUM 

The Rev. James Demarest, an old friend and schoolmate of Dr. Talmage, 
followed Dr. Hamlin. He said : 

" The first feeling that comes to me in connection with the departure of 
our dear friend, is one of astonishment that he is really dead. For he was 
the most thoroughly alive man I ever knew. He had abounded vitality. Can 
it be that this stout heart has ceased to beat? Is it possible that this resonant 
voice has fallen into silence ? That this expressive countenance has lost its 
mobility, that these fingers shall no longer hold the pen of a ready writer? 
The change is so vast as to seem impossible. The next feeling of my heart 
is one of profound sorrow — that this strong man should fall ; that a dear and 
cherished friend should be taken away ! 

" My acquaintance with Dr. Talmage began when we were fellow-students 
in the Theological Seminary at Xew Brunswick, and ripened into a friendship 
that has been maintained in constancy ever since. In those days he gave 
abundant evidence of the possession of extraordinary powers. He was strik- 
ingly original in his conceptions and his way of putting things. His imagina- 
tion was bold and vivid and wildly luxuriant, like a flower-garden overgrown 
with a tangled mass of richest and rarest bloom. Of course he was subjected 
to criticism, especiallv by the homiletical professor and the students before 
whom he preached. These criticisms were no doubt beneficial, for they tended 
to the pruning of his style, which he honestly tried to effect. 

" On one occasion, indeed, as I remember, he preached a sermon which 
was so" great a concession to homiletical rules as to be positively dry and dull. 
This, I think, must have been the hardest piece of work he ever did. Never 
again did he go to that extreme, for he could not so far fight against his 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



347 



nature as to be dry and dull except by the greatest effort ; but the training of 
the Seminary was of advantage to him in conjoining art to nature. 

" He has often been accused of sensationalism in the course of his preaching. 
Certainly he was sensational, but this was as natural to him as the color of his 
eyes or hair. It never was dragged in from without, but always w T elled up from 
within like a gushing fountain. Being entirely natural, his use of sensational- 
ism was entirely legitimate. 

GOD'S GLORY HIS AIM IN LIFE 

" It never was an end with him, but always a means to an end, and that 
end was the highest and noblest possible, namely, the glory of God. It was 




Copy:ight, 

IQ02. 

Abby 
Bak r 



TAKING THE VIOLET-COVERED CASKET INTO THE CHURCH 



for this he lived. His decided conviction was that any other object in life would 
make life a failure, and that any serious effort undertaken with any less 
worthy aim would make that effort a failure. In saying this I am virtually 
quoting his own utterances, made not in public under the inspiration of some 
special occasion, or to tickle the public ear, but in the calmness and privacy 
of friendly intercourse, as we talked together on this subject. 

" A man of his marked personality is sure to be criticised, and it is not 
strange that unworthy motives should have been imputed to him by those 



348 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



who were either incapable of understanding him or carelessly willing to judge 
him by the low standard which human nature is coo ready to adopt as the gauge 
of conduct. But knowing this man as I did, I can testify to the simplicity and 
godly sincerity of his motives. 

FAME NEVER. SPOILED HIM 

" Fame came to him in vast measure, but it never spoiled him, because he 
lived for something higher than fame. He was too level-headed a man to be 
carried away by popularity, but it was his true-heartedness especially that kept 




Copyright, 

IQ02, 

Abbv 
G. Baker 



REV. DR. HAMLIN ARRIVES 



him steady. He was not disturbed by the detraction of hostile critics, nor by 
the applause of the multitude that hung upon his words or devoured his writings. 
He accepted both as the natural incidents of a career devoted to an end 
which those very incidents would be likely to promote. If attention were in this 
way called to him, it would but enable him the better to command the attention 
of men to the Gospel message which it was the business of his life to declare. 
" In student days the geniality of Dr. Talmage and his rare gift of humor 
brought him into relations of good-fellowship with all his associates. There 



THE LAST OF EARTH 349 

was so much of brightness and fun about him that his presence was like sun- 
shine in any circle. With remarks of wit there was mingled such a kindliness 
that no sting was ever left by it. And this kindly wit and geniality were con- 
spicuous in his public life. He might say sharp things at times, but they were 
so pervaded by a kindly and even humorous tone that no wound was made. 
And as for injuries received, he was one of the most forgiving of men. It 
was impossible for him to hold a grudge. To be able to say, ' That difference 
is settled ; that contention is past and over,' was to him a great delight, and 
he would fling it aside with infinite relief as something to he thought of and 
spoken of no more. 

THE VOID THAT IS LEFT 

" And now this man of noble mould is gone from earth, and what a void 
is left ! He wielded a mighty power for good over millions of people who 
felt his personal influence on their hearts and lives in the sermons which 
brought them, week by week, a message. of hope and cheer and strength, glow- 
ing with true-hearted sympathy, with every human condition, and throbbing with 
the pulse-beat of his own abounding spiritual vitality. Who will take up the 
sceptre which he wielded with such conspicuous authority, but which has now 
dropped from his grasp? A prince and a great man is fallen in Israel. 

" But death gains a barren victory over a servant of God. What seems 
death is to him only transition, or rather translation, into glory. And no 
power of death can stop the train of benign influences that his life set in 
motion. His works do follow him. He lives still, not only in the affections 
of those who were kind to him in personal love and friendship, but in the lives 
of those who were uplifted by the strong grasp with which he laid hold of 
their spiritual natures, bringing them out into the light of God. A multitude 
bless God to-day that he has lived, and will see to it that both his memory and 
his influence in the world are kept alive. 

A ROUNDED CAREER. 

" We can hardly reconcile ourselves to the thought that his activities have 
ceased, that he has really passed away from earth ; and yet, now that he has 
fallen on sleep by the will of God, we can see that his career has been rounded 
out in beautiful symmetry and completeness. In the fulness of his fame, in 
the ripeness of his powers, in the midst of his witness-bearing for the truth 
by voice and pen, he passes over from these heights of honor and achievement 
to the heavenly heights, where the Master is ready with the crown. Though 
he loved the lower service, and would fain have filled up another decade or 
score of years with his accustomed toil, the transition to the higher service 
comes now as the fitting culmination of a great career. Farewell, then, 
brother ! We shall not see thy like again — so nobly endowed, so strong, so 



350 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



gentle, so magnanimous. We try to picture to ourselves the greeting that 
welcomed thee on the farther shore of those who were led to Christ by thy 
ministry, who had passed on into glory beforehand and were awaiting thy 
coming. Thou hast joined the shining ranks of those who, in the service of 
the skies, cease not to give glory to the Lamb that was slain, and to do His 
will. In such exalted employment, in such congenial company, in the fellow- 
ship of prophets and apostles, thou hast found thy place, and entered upon 
immortal activities. To depart and be with Christ is far better ! " 

DR. VAN DYKE'S REMARKS 

The Rev. Dr. Van Dyke followed in a striking eulogy. He said in part : 
" The world-wide reputation of Dr. Talmage will no longer have its expres- 
sion in present achievements, but his memory will still live. He has sometimes 
in his career been criticised because he was sensational. But he had to be sensa- 
tional to hold the attention to the Word of God of thousands of people who would 
otherwise not have listened to it. His later life was merely the unfolding of 
the sterling qualities he had so often shown in his younger days. He was never 
spoiled by the great reputation he had won. He was a man thoroughly conse- 




Copyright. Abby G. Baker, 1902 

the: cortege arrives AT THE CHURCH 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



35i 



crated to his work. His one great aim was to serve the God whose word he 
preached. His aim was to advance the kingdom of God. A great man has 
fallen. We mourn for him. Who will take his place? Yet death has gained 
a barren victory over this magnificent minister of God. We thought he had 
many years before him, but, alas, he was stricken before the slightest signs of 
decay were manifested in his wonderful powers. But he has gone to a nobler 
and greater life — a life which he ever held up as a prize invaluable before the 
eyes of men. For him to die was Christ. A crown of great glory has been 
placed upon his brow." 

REV. DR.. EASTON'S ADDRESS 

An impressive and eloquent address was that of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers 
Easton, D.D., of Washington, who told simply of the great man of God as he 
had seen and known him during a close acquaintance of many years. He said : 

" Can we compress the ocean into a dewdrop ? No more is it possible to 
condense into one brief hour what is due to the memory of our beloved and 
illustrious friend. Thousands, yea, tens of thousands, in this great Republic, 
and in empires across the Atlantic, have said it in tearful whispers, ' We shall 




Copyright, 1902, Abby G. Baker 

friends o£ the family entering the church 



352 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

not soon see his like again.' What an exceptional career! What a glorious 
man ! While the stars shine brightly above, we prize them not. When the sun 
glows in his bright effulgence, we stop not to eulogize his worth. But let the 
nights be darkness, as when Paul was tossed about on the Adriatic, or when 
Egypt was enshrouded in the gloom of the plague, and how then are the stars 
and sun missed? While great men are with us to fight our battles, to lead in 
great affairs of State, or voice appeals in behalf of righteousness, too often is 
it that, having the blessings of their presence and their mighty pens, we are 
unmindful of the men themselves. If honors bud upon the living, they seldom 
blossom except above the dead. Death clears our vision, wipes away our 
prejudices, hushes the tumult of critical rivalry, and reduces the vastness of sup- 
posed faults! How sudden and shocking was the voice that whispered through 
the land, and over all Europe, last Sabbath morning, ' Talmage is dead ! ' We 
only knew he was sick — then hopeless, then — dead ! We were accustomed to 
think of him as some tall, wide-spreading oak, hardened in storms, blessed by 
genial suns, and baptized in showers of peace! It did not occur to us that 
Talmage could die. His unsurprised preparation for every great task; his weird 
ubiquity, like Elijah in the olden times, lifting up his voice in churches and halls, 
here at the nation's capital to-day, then to-morrow appearing in some distant 
city, then in a week across oceans ; and his never failing power of inspiring the 
millions who heard him, and the dash and push by which, like Henry of Xavarre, 
his plume seemed ever waving in the forefront of the battle line for righteous- 
ness — this precluded from the public mind the very thought that Dr. Talmage 
would so soon join the hosts of America's illustrious dead! 

THE SECRET OF DR. TALMAGE'S GREATNESS 

" If, as his personal friend for over twenty years, I should attempt to open 
the treasures of his real greatness, where shall we find more of those sterling 
virtues that poets have sung, artists portrayed, and historians commended? He 
was truly a great man, because he was a man of God ! A vigorous intellect, — 
brilliant imagination lighting up the path of an indomitable will, and formulat- 
ing itself in splendid efficiency ! His moral courage was only equalled by his 
giant frame and physical strength. He was made of the very stuff that martyrs 
are made of, one of the most remarkable individualities of the nineteenth cen- 
tury ! A man with no negative qualities, aggressive and positive, his whole 
soul was full of convictions of right and duty. A firm friend, a man of ready 
recognition, a human magnet in his focalizing power ! He was true to every 
deed and thought of his life, and never needed a veil to be drawn, and calling 
for no nice circumlocution of words on the part of his friends to alter a doubt- 
ful eulogy! 

" Truthfulness, sincerity, frankness, courage, persistency, generosity, honor, 
manliness, a stern will to fight social wrongs, and a tender heart for peace, and 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



353 



an ocean-tide of sympathy for oppressed humanity, and over all swayed by the 
conviction that 'the right with the might and the. truth should be.' His inmost 
acts could be examined with honor! The brightest Pharaoh on the headlands 
of time is to-day extinguished, and that brilliant life which guided thousands 
upon thousands to a glorious, immortal destiny has gone out! No man has 
lived such an apostolic life since the days of Paul, and no name appears on the 
page of history so sweetly illumed with divine influence as that of Dr. Talmage ! 
His sermons and lectures have been read by all classes, from crowned emperors 
in palaces to toilers in miners' camps ; by sailors on shipboard and soldiers in 
the tented field ; in hospitals, in prisons, in asylums, in all parts of the habitable 
globe, souls have been nourished, consoled, cheered, inspired by his matchless 




Copyright, 1902, Abby G. Baker 
INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE COVENANT 



genius and sanctified talents ! All who knew this lost friend will carry forever 
the memory of one whose learning, will power, and love power, were in full 
action and in perfect harmony; no three strings in a harp were ever in richer 
accord. He lived to make the world brighter, happier and holier. His Gospel 
was full of the sweetest optimism and spiritual cheerfulness. No dirge or wail 
of despair was ever sounded in speech or sermon, and his home was the ideal 
of what he taught, a perfect realm of pure love and beauteous sunshine. He 
was great in his lofty magnanimity. During the whole period of his ecclesiastical 
trial in Brooklyn, and as I was with him day and night, he never once uttered 
a word of unkindness at his traducers, or to one whose malice had been evoked 
23 



354 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



by professional jealousy! Only once did I see him aroused to a white heat of 
anger and indignation, and then he belched forth as Vesuvius when convulsed 
with internal fires — it was when a vile sheet of the metropolis persisted 
assailed him for weeks by deliberate, malicious falsehoods, and by cartoons and 
charges that only a Satanic brain could hatch ! 

A TRUE PHILANTHROPIST 

" He was great in his spirit of philanthropy. When a heathen nation suffered 
for want of bread, his powerful appeals through that mighty agency — the 
greatest weekly paper of the century, The Christian Herald — enabled a response 
to be given that saved millions on millions of human lives ! India, part of 
England's empire, will never forget America's philanthropic Talmage ! Russia 




CROWDS AROUND THE TALMAGE PLOT IN GREENWOOD 



Copyright. iqo2. 
K.1 



Louis Klopsch 

acknowledged its everlasting debt to him also for aid in a crucial period, and 
in the palace of the Czar he was welcomed as a brother beloved. Greece, by 
its royal sovereign, paid homage to his greatness, and in the throne chamber 
of the Queen received her expressed admiration of his genius, fervor, and power 
as the greatest living preacher of the age ! 

" I said he was great in his generous philanthropy — but he gave silently. 
When he made his recent subscription of $1,000 for the ransom of Miss Stone, 
the missionary, he said to me : ' Easton, this means far more than can be 
imagined. For every incoming mail will bring appeals for money for all manner 
of objects from numerous societies, and for all kinds of sensational purposes.' 
He gave, to my knowledge, large sums, but silently, and only rich men can 
best appreciate his reasons. 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



355 



" In the long sweep of three-score and ten years there were to be few days 
of illness — few of weakness, leaving almost the seventy summers to come in 
a divine beauty. It took this man nearly seventy years to live his eventful life ; 
it took him only a few hours to die — a long, long sunshine of untarnished fame, 
and only a little cloud. And could he have spoken to the last he would have 
told us that even the cloud of death was silvered with the radiance of immor- 
tality ! The last look of recognition was given to his beloved wife, and the 
last words that fell from his lips when far down the valley were these : ' Eleanor ! 
Eleanor ! ' 

" It was said once by an eminent writer, that when Abraham Lincoln, the 
forest-born liberator, entered heaven, he threw down at God's throne three 
million yokes as the trophies of his act of emancipation — but great as that was, 




AT THE GRAVESIDE IN GREENWOOD CEMETERY 



Copyright, 1902, 
Louis Klopsch 



I think that it was small, indeed, to the tens of thousands of souls Talmage 
redeemed from the yokes of sin and shame by the glorious old Gospel preached 
with such heavenly fervor and power of the Holy Ghost ! What a mighty army 
stood ready to greet him at the gates of the heavenly city, as the warrior 
passed in to be crowned by his Sovereign and King ! " 



CHAMPION OF A PURE GOSPEL 

" The three greatest preachers of the nineteenth century were Beecher, Spur- 
geon, and Talmage — but the prince of the pulpit was Talmage ! Beecher was 
ornate, philosophic, and admired for his classic productions and brilliant effu- 
sions as an orator. Spurgeon was doctrinal and rigid in stern orthodoxy, and 



356 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

drew immense audiences by his fervor — but Talmage won all classes. He was 
practical, poetic and powerful, moving his audiences at will, either to tears or 
smiles, yet proclaiming a gospel of free and full salvation, and with a soul aflame 
with desires to win them to the Cross ! The scarlet thread of the atonement 
ran through all his sermons He had all the brilliancy of Beecher and doctrinal 
accuracy of Spurgeon, and power — more power than both of them — to reach 
and hold the multitudes for Christ ! Like the Master, ' the common people 
heard him gladly.' He was a Presbyterian, but truly catholic in spirit, loving 
all who loved his Master. Why lingered he so long this side of heaven ere he 
entered in? 

" To me it appeared in vision, as I bowed at his deathbed, that while heaven 
had seen some great days, the home-coming of this mighty warrior in the army 
militant was to be one of its greatest days, for he was to receive a welcome 
worthy of his conflict here, and all heaven was mustering hosts upon hosts to 
greet him at the gates of pearl ! I beheld the promised ' abundant entrance : 
as the hero cast aside his cross, and on either side of Talmage were glittering 
armies led on by Moody, and flanked by Beecher and Spurgeon, and reaching 
the throne of the Redeemer and Sovereign of that empire of eternal beauty, one 
word was our brother's greeting — welcome ! Welcome thou valiant con- 
queror and heroic champion of a pure Gospel ! Welcome thou wi.se winner 
of souls, behold these white-robed multitudes are thy glorious harvest ! Wel- 
come, thrice welcome, thou healer of broken hearts, and wounded spirits, for 
these are to be stars in thine eternal crown ! Come in ! Come in to thy rest 
and reward ! Then I saw the harpers on the sea of glass, one vast orchestra, 
and the music from their harps of gold melted into one song of victorship : 

' Servant of God, well done ! 
Thy glorious warfare's past ; 
The battle's fought, the race is won. 
And thou art crowned at last ! ' " 

Rev. J. S. T. Niccols also spoke of the labors of Dr. Talmage in the cause 
of Christianity. 

After the services at the church, the bereaved family returned to their 
home. An opportunity was then afforded the great gathering to view the 
remains. Hour after hour, in an unbroken line, the thousands passed reverently 
before the open casket for a last parting look at the face of the great preacher. 
The features, though worn by his long sickness, were natural and composed, like 
those of one who had fallen peacefully asleep. Many of those in the church 
were affected to tears. 

On the morning of Wednesday, April i6, the remains, which had lain in 
the church all night, w T ere taken to the Pennsylvania Railroad depot, and placed 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



357 



on board a special car to be conveyed to Brooklyn. The car was the same that 
was used as a funeral car to convey the body of the late President McKinley 
to Canton. The train reached Jersey City at 6 135 A. m. Accompanying the 
remains were the members of the Talmage household and their immediate 
relatives : Mr. T. McCutcheon, a relative ; The Rev. Howard Suydam, of 
Rhinebeck, N. Y. ; Dr. Louis Klopsch ; F. M. Lawrence, and E. H. Branch, 
members of the old board of directors of Dr. Talmage's Brooklyn Tabernacle ; 
the Rev. James Demarest, and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Chalmers Easton. 

Long before 9 a. m., the hour set for the interment in Greenwood Cemetery, 
people began to flock in at the various cemetery gates, and there was a large 
gathering at the Talmage family plot. It was a very simple and unpretentious 




Copyright, 
1902, 
Louis 
Klopsch 



ARRIVAL OF THE CASKLT AT THE BURIAL SPOT 

home which was to be the last resting-place of the world's greatest preacher. 
Almost in the centre of the enclosure was the newly-opened grave. 



A WREATH FROM PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

All around the grave were great mounds of flowers in various designs. 
The President's offering had been brought on from Washington, and was con- 
spicuous by its beauty. Dr. Talmage's associates on The Christian Herald had 
sent a great cross of white roses and autumn leaves, and a fine stand of lilies 
and roses was sent by the readers and scholars of the Brooklyn Tabernacle 
Sunday School. Among the large assemblage present were many who had been 
hearers of Dr. Talmage during his Brooklyn ministry. There were hundreds 
who came from considerable distances, drawn thither by the love they bore 



358 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND "WORK 



the dead pastor. A number of former deacons and trustees of the Brooklyn 
Tabernacle were also present, among them being Meiwin F. \Y. Lawrence. 
E. H. Branch, Leonard Moody, A. H. Wadhams, George C. Gill, J. H. Fer- 
gueson. The Christian Herald was represented by its proprietor, the entire 
editorial staff and a large number of employees, and there was also a delegation 
from the Bowery Mission. 

When the funeral party had arrived, the casket was carried into the 
enclosure. It bore on a silver plate the simple inscription : 

THOMAS DEWITT TALMAGE 
January 7, 1832. April 12, 1902. 

The Rev. Dr. Howard Suydam, of Rhinebeck, X. Y., a friend and former 
classmate of the dead pastor, and who had been one of the principal speakers at 
the obsequies in Washington, delivered a brief address. He said : 

REV. DR. SUYDAMS ADDRESS 

" Friends, we are gathered here to place in the ground all that could die of 
the Rev. Dr. Thomas DeWitt Talmage. The Christian world laments his depart- 
ure. From the rural home of his boyhood in Xew Jersey, from the successive 
churches he served, from the continents across the ocean, and from the islands of 
the sea there come the sounds of mourning because Dr. DeWitt Talmage is no 
more. The world seems lonelv without him. 




PLACING THE CASKET IN POSITION 



Copyright, iq-2, 
Louis Klopsch 



THE LAST OF EARTH 



359 



" He was a mighty power for good. By voice and pen he reached more indi- 
viduals than any other man that ever lived in his generation. By forty-six years 
of preaching, and for the most part to crowded audiences, and by his published 
sermons, weekly read by many millions of people, he impressed the minds, affected 
the hearts, and influenced the lives of his great constituency in the way of up-lift, 
of consolation, and spiritual salvation. 

BROUGHT MULTITUDES TO CHRIST 

" What thousands were brought into the kingdom through his instrumen- 
tality ! How many bleeding hearts have been soothed and bound up by the appli- 
cation of God's word through his matchless skill ! And how many men and women 
walk the earth to-day clothed and in their right minds, whom his words induced 
to a pathway of reform ! The instrument through whom God produced this 
power is removed, the tongue is silent, and the hand forever palsied. But the 
influence remains, and will be transmitted to generations. There is an immor- 
tality of personality, and there is also an immortality of influence. The former, 




THE FLORAL TRIBUTES ON DR. TALMAGE S GRAVE 



Copyright, tqo2, 
Louis Klopsch 



360 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



carrying with it a conscious identity, which implies a heavenly recognition, Dr. 
Talmage has now entered upon though removed from the flesh; the latter flows 
on as if nothing had occurred to interrupt the movements of the instrument. 
This influence will be perpetual. ' His works do follow him.' 

TRIUMPH OVER DEATH 

" Our gathering, however, is not simply to mourn over the removal of this 
great man. There is a note of triumph in the dirge. He has gone home to his 
rest and reward, to the place which Jesus said he had prepared for his disciples. 
His work was finished. He was wearied, and the Lord has given him sleep. I 
believe if he were present, or could direct these services he would prefer, after 
the benediction should be pronounced, that some skilful performer, such as 
formerly led the praises of the great congregation in the Brooklyn Tabernacle, 
should, with a silver trumpet, sound out a paean of victory to interpret the words 
of Job, ' I know that my Redeemer liveth," according to the immortal music of 
Handel's Messiah, so that it should echo over these acres of the dead, and pass 
through yonder gateway to the ocean and ^ass across and be heard by the Chris- 
tian world ! Victory and peace ! 

A SWEET CONSOLATION 

" In the memory of his simple faith, of his mighty work, of his loving heart, 
of his final triumph she who is now widowed, and those who are now fatherless 
will find their consolation, as they continue to live in the love and the service of 
the same Blessed Master/' 

At the conclusion of his address, Dr. Suydam read the Episcopal burial 
service, the violet-covered casket being lowered into the grave as he slowlv and 
solemnly pronounced the words " earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." 
With bowed and uncovered heads the spectators listened reverently. Many of 
them waited until the last sod was replaced, and then, as they turned sadly 
awav, exoressions of sorrow could be heard on everv hand. 




THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 

A GREAT TALMAGE MEMORIAL MEETING IN BROOKLYN ADDRESSES BY MANY EMI- 
NENT PASTORS— TESTIMONIALS FROM DISTINGUISHED MEN IN AMERICA AND 
EUROPE READ TO THE AUDIENCE — THE GREAT PREACHER'S GENIUS EXTOLLED 
AND THE FAR-REACHING INFLUENCE OF HIS LIFE-WORK RECOGNIZED 



*~<\W- 




enMi><*&<±)±)^ 



HEN a great man dies — one who has been a benefactor to his 
kind — it is fitting that those who knew him and loved him, as 
well as those who had felt in their own lives the uplifting influence 
of his example should give public expression to their sorrow and 
also to their admiration. With one hand, they place upon the 
brow of the dead the chaplet of fame ; with the other, the wreath 
of cypress. 

It was a magnificent audience that assembled in the Central Presbyterian 
Church, Brooklyn, on Sunday evening, April 27, 1902, to take part in the Me- 
morial Services in honor of the late Dr. Talmage. The Rev. John F. Carson, the 
pastor, had beside him on the platform a number of leading clergymen of Man- 
hattan and Brooklyn, and in the assemblage there were many hundreds of 
prominent business and professional men of both cities and many from out-of- 
town. There was a goodly proportion of ladies present. Among the audience 
were many of Dr. Talmage's old church and Sunday School members, who had 
come to do honor to the memory of their former pastor. 

A MIGHTY GATHERING 

Long before four o'clock, the hour of beginning the service, the sidewalks 
were blocked and the great building crowded almost to suffocation. The plat- 
form was as crowded as the church proper. Ira D. Sankey occupied a camp- 
stool beside a small organ, to the accompaniment of which he sang one or two 
of Dr. Talmage's favorite hymns. Guilm ant's organ prelude, " Lamentation," 
played by Prof. Henry Eyre Browne, the former organist of the Brooklyn 
Tabernacle, opened the services. Then, at the request of the Rev. Dr. Carson, 
who presided, the audience sang the hymn, "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," which. 
Dr. Carson explained, had been a great favorite with Dr. Talmage. An 
invocation by the Rev. Orrin G. Cocks, Dr Carson's assistant, followed, after 
which Dr. Carson made a brief address. He said: 

361 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 



3$ 



REV. DR.. CARSON'S ADDRESS 

" This vast assemblage is the eulogy of this afternoon. No word that shall 
be spoken, however eloquent or loving, can compare with the tribute which this 
great audience in itself pays to the life and work of Dr. Talmage. It is a worthy 
tribute to a worthy man. It tells the place which 
Dr. Talmage holds in the thoughts and affections 
of the people of Brooklyn. It is a Talmage audi- 
ence. Such an audience as waited on his preaching 
now assembles to pay tribute to his life. 

" We have not assembled to praise Dr. Talmage. 
His life alone praises him, all other praise lan- 
guishes by the side of his great name. It would 
be idle to spend this hour in discoursing upon the 
great qualities of his mind and heart — his intellec- 
tual force, his originality, his spiritual fervor. The 
service is an appreciation. 

" I knew Dr. Talmage, if not intimately, cer- 
tainly well, and during the past ten years had fre- 
quent intercourse and much fellowship with him. 
I knew him as a warm-hearted, genial, generous 
man. There was nothing small in his life, no little 
envies, no petty jealousies. God built T. DeWitt 
Talmage on broad lines. I never knew him to 
utter a word in depreciation of any man. His word 
was always in praise, sometimes in pity for some carping critic, but never in 
resentment. 

A HEART FRIENDLY TO ALL MEN 

" His cheerful, buoyant spirit was the outflow of a heart friendly to all men. 
He was a man of strong friendship. His was a big heart, and so he had many 
friends. Poverty of heart means pauci-'y of friends. Dr. Talmage's rich heart 
made many friends. He had the joy of the experience that he was something 
to others and that others were much to him. His personality appeared in his 
preaching. Strong as a man, he was monumental as a preacher. 

" In many respects Dr. Talmage was the outstanding Gospel preacher of 
his age. His audiences girdled the earth and each week waited for the sermon 
with expectant interest. Those sermons dealt with great spiritual entities. 
They were practical, helpful and hope-inspiring. It was this note of optimism, 
of hope, of uplift that made him the inspiring preacher that he was. It was this 
that secured him great audiences wherever he preached. It was this which 
created the possibility of the publication of his sermons in thousands of papers 
and in all lands, a possibility which the sanctified genius and consecrated busi- 
ness tact of another realized. Through the plan and work of his honored 




REV. DR. CARSON, D.D 



364 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

co-worker and friend, Dr. Louis Klopsch, these sermons became the spiritual 
food of tens of thousands of the unchurched and the spiritual help and comfort 
of thousands of God's people. 

HIS PASSION FOR. THE CROSS 

" All of Dr. Talmage's preaching centered about the Cross. If he had any 
passion it was a passion for the Cross oi Christ. He was a word painter, 
excelling all others in the art, but he always painted the Cross. He was an 
orator, excelled by but few, but his oratory always pushed the Cross to the 
front. The whole ministry of Dr. Talmage is an inspiration. It tells us that 
men listen sharpest to the note that comes straightest from the Cross of the 
Redeemer. If any man thinks that Calvary and its Gospel are not sufficient to 
attract and to hold the attention of men I would point him to the ministry of 
T. DeWitt Talmage. He preached the old message and men listened. He 
believed in the Bible — it was to him the Word of God from the ' in the begin- 
ning ' of Genesis to the ' amen ' of the Revelation. He believed in the Christ 
as the Saviour of men. He believed in the Holy Spirit as the power of God. 

" We loved him as a friend, we respected him as a man, we honored him 
as a servant of Jesus Christ, we knew him as a man and a minister whom God 
singularly owned and abundantly blessed. He has finished his course. He 
has run his race. He has fought his battle. He was ready for the messenger, for 
the final rest and for the eternal crown." 

The Rev. J. Wilbur Chapman, D.D., pastor of the Fourth Presbvterian 
Church, Manhattan, an old friend of Dr. Talmage, who was to have been 
present, was unable to get there, and Dr. Carson read a note from him, regret- 
ting his forced absence, and setting forth that " Dr. Talmage was one of the 
greatest, if not the greatest, preaching evangelizing forces of the dav." Dr. 
Carson added : " On this platform is one who knew Dr. Talmage long and inti- 
mately. I refer to Mr. Ira D. Sankey, who will now address you." 

MR. SANKEY'S TRIBUTE 

When Mr. Sankey came forward to speak, there was a stir in the audience. 
The famous Gospel singer spoke as follows : 

" In the death of Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage, the world has lost its most dra- 
matic and pictorial preacher. For the last quarter of a century no minister has 
drawn so many young people to hear the Gospel. I was in his last great 
Tabernacle in Brooklyn the morning it was destroyed by fire, and heard him 
preach his last sermon there. The house was crowded, and as I looked over 
that vast audience, made up largely of young men and women — many of them 
just establishing homes of their own, and just starting out on the voyage of life 
together — I felt a deep sense of thankfulness to God for a preacher who could 
draw to the house of worship such a multitude of young people. 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 365 

" He had a wonderful power over an audience, holding them spellbound by 
the hour. He loved to hear the people sing the grand old hymns of the Church, 
as well as the newer sacred songs of our present time. In no church in America 
could there be heard grander and more hearty congregational singing than in 
the Brooklyn Tabernacle, and only in Charles H. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tab- 
ernacle in London could anything like it be heard in all the world. 

" It was my pleasure to hear Dr. Talmage very often when he lived in 
Brooklyn, but I never heard him close a sermon without urging his audience 
to an acceptance of the Gospel. 

" He had a warm heart for every one, a kind and sympathetic nature, and 
never spoke harshly of any. When he was reviled, he never stopped long enough 
to reply in kind, but went right on with his work, scattering sunshine, joy and 
gladness wherever he went. Our homes were for many years on the same street, 
and almost any day he could be seen rushing away to Prospect Park for a long 
walk amid the trees and flowers, and no doubt amid these fair scenes of nature 
many a sermon was prepared for pulpit and press. Dr Cuyler, also my beloved 
neighbor and friend, tells how the great preacher, on going to the park one 
day, called at his door and said : ' Come, Cuyler, let us go out to the park and 
drink in two or three acres of sunshine.' 

" Dr. Talmage preached to the whole world as no man has done since the 
days of the Apostles. Through the pulpit and the press he has been a blessing 
to millions of discouraged ones throughout the world, and has sent them on their 
pilgrim way with a new hope in their hearts and a song of joy on their lips. 

" My friend and brother, Mr. Moody, believed in Dr. Talmage. Often he 
said to me that he was one of the greatest preachers of the age. He often 
tried to get him to devote all his time to direct evangelistic work. 

" In all this fair world of ours God has never made two flowers, or even two 
blades of grass, alike. Neither has he made all preachers alike, for which let 
us be devoutly thankful ! In our day, there has been but one Beecher, one 
Spurgeon, and one Talmage; each entirely different from the other and yet 
multitudes crowded to hear them for the last thirty years. ' To every man his 
work.' " 

Mr. Sankey then sang with much feeling the hymn, " Out of the Shadow 
Land." 

The Rev. Chandler A. Oakes, of Kingston, N. Y., who was assistant to Dr. 
Talmage in Brooklyn for some years, followed Mr. Sankey. He referred to 
Dr. Talmage as one of the greatest advocates of the teachings of Jesus Christ 
the world has ever known, and declared that there was no possible way to esti- 
mate the worth of the work he had done. " He still lives," Mr. Oakes declared. 
" His word still rings around the world. The structure he reared is imperish- 
able. We loved him, the world loved him; but we were forced to say farewell 
till we meet again." 



366 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Dr. James Demarest, pastor of the North Reformed Church (who had pre- 
viously taken part in the Washington service) was introduced by Dr. Carson 
as one who had been a life-long friend of Dr. Talmage. Dr. Demarest said it 
was eminently fitting that the Reformed Church should pay its tribute. 

" Dr. Talmage," he said, " was born and brought up in the Reformed 
Church. His parents were Dutch, and their boy was baptized in infancy and nur- 
tured in the Heidelberg Catechism. He was ordained by the Classis of Bergen. 
N. J., and his first three pastoral charges were in the Dutch Church. As one 
of the canons of the citadel, he stood by and never swerved one iota from the 
teachings of our holy religion." 

THE WIDEST OF ALL MINISTRIES 

Dr. Demarest said Dr. Talmage had been the victim of carping critics, 
which he rarely answered, but they criticised because they did not know him. 
" Sensational he undoubtedly was, but he never made a bad use of it. It was part 
of himself, and the use he made of it was perfectly legitimate. Dr. Talmage did 
not," said Dr. Demarest, " welcome attraction to himself. He was freer from 
any exaltation of himself than any man I ever knew. His desire and purpose 
and aim was to glorify God. As time goes on he will be more and more 
regarded as one of the heroes of God. He undoubtedly reached more men by 
speech and pen than any man that ever lived. A prince and a great man has 
fallen in Israel." 

The Rev. Dr. S. P. Cadman, pastor of the Central Congregational Church, 
said the seventy years of the career of Dr. Talmage illustrated the power of 
Christian speech. " Now that all the great preachers are dead," said Dr. 
Cadman, " we young preachers should study the methods they employed. Dr. 
Talmage dealt with entities, not with theological systems, although we must have 
theological systems, and he recognized the gifts of God. The sanctified use of 
speech is a great power, and in the simple presentation of truths Dr. Talmage 
excelled. Let us to-day, in all Christian love and catholicity of spirit, remember 
what he was and not stop too long to find out what he was not. He was a great 
preacher of the Gospel of Christ." 

The Rev. Dr. David Gregg, pastor of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian 
Church, sent a letter from which Dr. Carson read the following extract: "I 
esteem Dr. Talmage as one of the outstanding Gospel preachers of the age. I 
shall hold to the eulogv which I pronounced at his installation in Washington, 
D. C. This has been put into type. I shall ask the public to accept it as my 
memorial utterance." 

REV. DR.. FAR.R.AR/S BEAUTIFUL EULOGY 

Dr. Carson introduced as the last speaker the Rev. Dr. Tames M. Farrar, 
pastor of the First Reformed Church, Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street. He 
said: 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 367 

" Dr. Talmage was not a perfect man. Had he been perfect he would have 
been as monumental in his loneliness as he was in his greatness. This world has 
known but one perfect man ; one to reveal the capability of humanity, but one to 
show how difficult it is to attain unto perfection. Dr. Talmage's imperfections 
were little things to which attention was drawn by his own greatness ; motes 
made visible in the sun rays of his genius. ' The common people heard him 
gladly,' and he was glad to preach to them. 

" I once preached in a church where the Doctor had supplied the pulpit a 
few Sundays before. One of the ' pillars.' told me he ' enjoyed my audience ' 
much better than the one Dr. Talmage had. Then he told me that policemen 
had to stand at the door with a rope to keep the crowds in order when Talmage 
was there. I looked over my audience and suggested that if he could find those 
policemen and that rope, he might send them out to enlarge my audience. It 
would not have been safe to have broken through the roof of that church in 
order to have procured a hearing from Dr. Talmage. 

THE SILVER TRUMPET OF THE EVANGEL 

" The question is often asked, what has become of the large membership of 
the Tabernacle ? The pastors in this city of Brooklyn can answer the question : 
We have fifteen of the families in our church. One of our elders and superin- 
tendent of the Sunday School was converted through the preaching of Dr. Tal- 
mage. A canvass of Brooklyn churches will answer the caustic question. Three 
great preachers proclaimed the Gospel during the closing years of the nineteenth 
century : Beecher, the prophet of humanity ; Spurgeon, the Evangelist of Pente- 
cost, and Talmage, the silver trumpet of the Evangel. They held the Christian 
world in line while crossing into the new era of Biblical interpretation. The 
silver trumpet was carried over into the new century and it gave it the Gospel 
note of true and triumphant preaching. The City of Churches was his pulpit, 
the printing press his sounding board. The Word of God was his message, the 
newspapers his manuscripts. Fifty two Sundays were the aisles and more than 
a million of homes were the pews of his Tabernacle. The world was his parish 
and the lecture field his recreation grounds. May his mantle fall upon the 
shoulders of his son ! In this memorial service we unite in extending sympathy 
to his family and to the twenty millions of his friends. Many of the members of 
the triple Tabernacle are not in any of the Brooklyn churches. Thev have 
welcomed their pastor into his greater parish. Dr. Talmage was not a perfect 
man ; he is perfect now." 

TRIBUTES FROM MANY LANDS 

Rev. Dr. Carson then advanced to the front of the platform and read a 
number of letters, cable dispatches and telegrams from eminent persons in 
Europe and the United States, expressing their deepest sorrow over the death of 
Dr. Talmage and praising his grand life-work for Christianity. These communi- 



368 T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AND WORK 

cations were of an extraordinary and varied character, and, collectively, consti- 
tuted the highest tribute ever paid to a preacher of the Gospel. They were as 
follows : 

RUSSIA'S GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE 

From Count Andre Bobrinskoy, the personal friend of the Czar and a Rus- 
sian noble of high rank and exalted official position ( whom Dr. Talmage met 
when in St. Petersburg in connection with The Christian Herald's famine relief 
work in 1892), came this despatch: 

" St. Petersburg, April 21. 
" Deeply affected. We keep in grateful remembrance Talmage's fraternal 
assistance in our days of need. 

(Signed) Bobrinskoy/' 

PREACHED TO THE ISLANDS OF THE SEA 

" He was never in the Hawaiian Islands but once, and then only for a day 
at Honololu, but every English-speaking citizen of our little mid-ocean common- 
wealth knew Dr. Talmage. Each weekly paper from the States came bringing 
one of his sermons. In this way he preached to congregations in the islands of 
the sea, five thousand miles away from his home, and girdled the globe, wherever 
English was spoken, with his good influence. Sax ford Dole, 

Governor of Hawaii." 

A VALIANT SOLDIER OF THE CROSS 

"I knew Dr. Talmage, and with all his countrymen esteemed him the ablest 
exponent of the Christian religion, and one of its mightiest orators. With all 
good people I deplore his death. A Valiant Herald of the Cross has fallen 
indeed and for him we sincerely mourn. 

Hexry C. Corbix, 

Adj. -Gen. U. S. A." 

POET AS WELL AS PREACHER 

" I had the good fortune to know Dr. Talmage somewhat intimately in his 
later years, and I regard it as among the highest privileges of my life. He was 
one of the most useful men of his time. His influence extended wherever the 
English language was spoken. He was helpful in all of the relations of life. 
At the time of his death, he was the greatest popular orator in the English- 
speaking pulpit. He was a poet as well as a preacher. He was sometimes criti- 
cised as a sensationalist, but genius is always sensational, and it must be said to 
Dr. Talmage's everlasting credit, that whatever arts he used to attract the 
crowds, he never failed to preach the faith once delivered to the saints. He 
suffered from the carping criticisms of smaller men, but after the whole record 
of his life is written, his name will appear among the great evangelists of the 
Christian religion. Johx P. Dolliver, 

U. S. Senate." 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 



3^9 



PREACHED THE GOSPEL AND NOTHING ELSE 

He addressed the greatest audiences of any living preacher; for his ser- 
mons were reproduced in a great many of the papers, both daily and weekly, 
throughout the republic. This remarkable hold he had on the American people 
was due chiefly to the fact that he preached the Gospel and nothing else. His 
marvelous imagery, his amazing fertility of illustration, all contributed to the 
entertainment he afforded his readers ; after all, the unswerving, unyielding 
preaching of the Gospel was the principal source of his power. The American 
people are tired of hearing learned and entertaining lectures delivered under the 
guise of sermons ; they hunger and thirst for the preaching of the faith, unweak- 
ened by doubts, criticism or explanation, uncompromisingly delivered, as Dr. Tal- 
mage gave it. Senator Beveridge/'' 




HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW 



D. B. HENDERSON 



SENATOR WM. P. FRYE 



"THE COMMON PEOPLE HEARD HIM GLADLY" 

" Probably no other preacher ever reached so many and such large congrega- 
gations as did Dr. Talmage. For many years his sermons had wider publicity in 
secular newspapers than was ever accorded to lecturer or preacher in this or any 
other country. He had wonderful skill in commanding the attention and interest 
of both the learned and unlearned and it may be said of him as of the Master 
of old, ' The common people heard Him gladly.' His genial character won 
friends wherever he went in his w T ide circuit. His death will create a vacancy 
hard to fill. Hon. Eixis H. Roberts/' 

HE LEAVES A LARGE VOID 

" I have known Dr. Talmage for twenty-five years. He was a very remark- 
able man, brought up, trained, and remaining always in the school of Cal- 
vinism and the Presbyterian church, he yet succeeded, without offending his 
24 



370 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

brethren, in somehow creating the impression that he had liberalized the prin- 
ciples of the great Geneva reformer. He performed one feat which I know of 
no one else doing except Beecher. He stood the test of a weekly publication of 
his sermons for years, that publication being in the same newspapers and to the 
same audiences. A relative of mine, who was his warm admirer and friend, 
said of Henry Ward Beecher that he clipped the files in which his sermons 
appeared, and at the end of five years made a critical review of the clippings. He 
told me that he failed to find a single repetition in illustration, anecdote or 
phrase. This is unequaled intellectual resource and versatility ; but my impres- 
sion is, after having read many of Dr. Talmage's sermons, that they would bear 
an equal scrutiny and review. The influence of a teacher who commands so wide 
an audience can hardly be estimated, and his death leaves a large void in the 
agencies which go for better thinking and better living. 

Chauncey M. Depew, 

U. S. Senator." 

HIS INFLUENCE POWERFUL FOR GOOD 

From Hon. W. P. Frye, President of the U. S. Senate came this message: 
" Dr. Talmage was one of the great preachers of this age, reaching with his 
sermons more hearers and readers than any other. Both in pulpit and' on plat- 
form his influence was powerful, always for good. He has gone to his reward." 

HE REPRESENTED THE SUNLIGHT OF THEOLOGY 

" Dr. Talmage will be missed. He was a high type of the great modern 
preacher. He represented the sunlight and not the clouds of theology. He 
carried sunlight into the pulpit, into the home, and into human hearts. He lifted 
up and never depressed. He was genial as a friend, fearless as a foe, and soon 
made the foe a friend. D. B. Henderson, 

Speaker, House of Representatives." 

HE BELIEVED WHAT HE PREACHED 

" Dr. Talmage reached more people for a greater length of time than any of 
his profession during two generations. He thoroughly believed what he preached. 
The matter of his discourse, as well as the manner of his delivery, pleased the 
people, and he exercised more influence than any other man has done in many 
years. Joseph Cannon, 

Chairman of the Appro. Com. of the House." 

HE WAS FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS 

" Of Dr. Talmage it can be said, his speech was ever for righteousness. With 
him, the preaching of the Gospel as he conceived it was the controlling motive 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 



37i 



of his life, and this he preached with peculiar efficacy. The worker has fallen, but 
the work will go on ; and yet we can but say, Who can take Dr. Talmage's 
place? Hon. W. P. Diijjngham, 

U. S. Senator, from Vermont." 

HE GAVE HIS LIFE TO HIS WORK 

Illinois' able Senator, the Hon. Shelby Cullom, who was one of Dr. Tal- 
mage's pall-bearers, sent the following : 

" Dr. Talmage for a number of years has been my neighbor. I had learned 
to love him. He was a great man, a great preacher, and a great writer. He has 
preached to millions of people. No one can estimate the amount of good he 
has done as a minister of the Gospel. He had the power to do work to a mar- 




CHAS. W. FAIRBANKS 



GEN. NEESON A. MILES 



ADJ. -GEN. H. C. CORBIN 



velous degree. He did too much work; he wore out his brain, he overtaxed it, 
and it gave way to the strain. He gave his life, in his zeal, for the uplifting of 
humanity. He was a man of great physical and mental powers ; he did not 
realize that there was any limit to his endurance, or his capacity to do. His 
work is done, his career on earth is ended, and the world will miss him. His 
family are sitting in the dark shadow of death. Talmage is dead ! " 

A GREAT AND GOOD MAN 

" Dr. Talmage touched and moved the religious feelings of the masses most 
completely and widely by his brilliant thought and earnest eloquence. He 
impressed me as a great and good man, who devoted his life work to the moral 
and spiritual welfare of his fellowmen. Nelson A. Miles, 

Gen'l Com. U. S. A." 



3^2 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

HE MADE MANKIND BETTER 

Ex-Secretary John W. Foster, America's most eminent diplomat, who was 
also one of the pall-bearers : 

" Dr. Talmage's theology was of the old-fashioned kind, not clouded with 
doubt or uncertainty as to the inspiration of the Scriptures or the miracles, and 
little influenced by the higher criticism. His preaching was the Gospel pro- 
claimed by Whitefield and Finney, and which made Moody so popular. Many 
thousands of men and women, throughout this and other lands, who have been 
lifted up and made better by his preaching and his writings, will deeply mourn his 
death." 

HE POINTED THE WAY TO HEAVEN 

" In the death of Dr. Talmage we lose a great and good man. Two hemis- 
pheres mourn at the grave of one who has been a most potent influence in lifting 
humanity into a higher and serener atmosphere. He was acknowledged the fore- 
most pulpit orator of his time. No one possessed in a fuller measure than he 
the power of impressing immortal truths upon the souls of men, and of pointing 
the way to an everlasting life. His good deeds will live after him. 

Chas. W. Fairbanks/' 

GREATEST PREACHER OF HIS GENERATION 

" Dr. Talmage was the greatest preacher that the living generation has heard. 
He has preached to more people than any one since Christ. His loss cannot be 
estimated. C. H. Grosvenor, 

House of Representatives 



THE ONE DOMINANT RELIGIOUS FORCE 



Congressman W. A. Smith, of Michigan, one of the pall-bearers: 
" Dr. Talmage was at the time of his death the most dominant force in the 
religion of our day. He illuminated the Holy Scriptures with a radiant and 
living light. He stood out from his fellows like a great beacon in the ocean of 
life. To have known him intimately was a priceless privilege which I shall 
always treasure. He encompassed the world with his thought and brought all 
people nearer to God. He dwelt among his friends in unrestrained kinship ; but, 
like a great mountain peak, he towered so high that, as the clouds fell nearer the 
earth, his was the first lofty and majestic figure to pierce the azure blue. The 
millions living, whom he has comforted, will greatly miss him, while those whom 
he has led through the dark valley will this morning sing anthems of joy." 

HIS INFLUENCE WILL GO ON 

" Dr. Talmage was one of the most remarkable men of the times. He possessed 
wonderful oratorical powers, which have rarely been equaled, and his earnest 






THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 373 

work in the elevation of mankind will, in my opinion, be felt effectively in the 
years to come. He was a most genial and lovable man, with a heart brimful 
of human kindness and in sympathy with every good work. His teaching and 
example have already accomplished great good, and will have a material effect on 
the American people, and, in fact, on all English-speaking people, for a long 
time to come. Senator Jones, 

Arkansas, Chairman Dem. Nat. Com." 

A GREAT LIGHT ECLIPSED 

" In the religious world a great light has gone out, and the darkness is the 
deeper because of the grandeur with which it shone. 

Francis M. Cockreix, 

Sen. from Missouri." 

HIS MIND A STOREHOUSE OF KNOWLEDGE 

" Dr. Talmage was a man of genius; He had a vivid imagination, a wonderful 
command of language and a vast store of information. His knowledge was not 
of a general kind, but reached even to details. This gave him a power of illus- 
tration which added greatly to the interest of his sermons. As he was a good 
man and sincere, his qualities made him what he was — the greatest preacher of 
our day. He was a useful man and exerted a wide-reaching influence for good. 
He was an industrious man, and made use of all his time in his chosen work. 
Either from his pulpit or from his pen his influence was continuous. He was a 
sympathetic man and lovable. In every sphere of life to which he was called he 
measured up fully to its requirements as he understood them to be. His influ- 
ence for good will remain for, being dead, yet speaketh. 

Hon. John Daezell, 
Pennsylvania, Mem. House of Representatives." 

A MOUNTAIN OF SPIRITUAL SPLENDOR. 

" Dr Talmage was more nearly a world preacher than any other person in 
his time. Looking at his work without personal intimacy with the man, it 
appears a mountain of intellectual and spiritual splendor, sufficient to supply the 
religious and moral needs of the race for a century. Add to the work personal 
acquaintance with the man, and it takes on a sweetness and mellowness nothing 
else can impart. 

" Mr. Talmage's death makes a gap in the ranks of pulpit and platform 
teachers that generations may not close up. Prodigies come with the longest 
intervals between. When Mr. Talmage's vacant place will be filled a prophet 
alone can foretell. I knew Mr. Talmage, not intimately, but well. The memorv 
of all his greatness and brilliancy and goodness is a life gift with which I would 
not part. T. M. Patterson, 

U. S. Sen., from Colorado." 



374 T- DH WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

HIS FIELD THE GOSPEL 

" Dr. Talmage had every gift of the natural orator, and while he was pre- 
eminently successful as a lecturer, his great field was preaching the Gospel. 
He wasted no time in fruitless searchings after higher criticism of his Bible, 
but believing it with all His heart, he was the honest exponent of his belief. 
He was devoted to his calling, and, aside from Whitefield and Wesley, no man 
in the past hundred years has had such audiences as greeted him. He had a 
broad conception of the brotherhood of mankind ; he loved his fellowman, and 
tried to lift his burden. He had as few enemies as any one who ever lived in 
public life. Lkonidas F. Livingston, 

Mem. House of Representatives, Georgia." 

[PREACHED TO THE MULTITUDE 

Hon. James D. Richardson, leader of the minority in the House of Repre- 
sentatives : 

" I admired Dr. Talmage very greatly. I was not a member of his denomi- 
nation, but I never failed to hear him when it was possible to do so. As 
a preacher he was unequalled, but the greatest amount of good that he accom- 
plished was undoubtedly through the wide publication of his sermons. Thou- 
sands of men who, from want of time or inclination, did not attend church, had 
the Gospel brought to them in the daily newspapers. They read his sermons 
on Monday morning, as they were whirled to business in the train or street car, 
or perhaps in the quiet of their offices, and beyond a doubt they were made 
better men for reading them." 

HIS FAME WAS INTERNATIONAL 

Hon. Washington Gardner, Representative from Michigan : 
" Dr. Talmage has for more than thirty years been one of the foremost pulpit 
orators of America, and for twenty years preceding his death his fame was 
international. He has probably preached to more people with the living voice 
and printed page than any other American, and only surpassed in Europe by 
Spurgeon. His mental endowments and the operations of his mind were so 
different from those of his great contemporaries that he can hardly be compared 
with them. Without the wonderful versatility of Beecher, the chaste diction and 
splendid oratorical poise of Chapin, or the scholarly solidity of Storrs, he sur- 
passed all of them in the brilliancy of his imagination, in the bold and at times 
startling, and again beautiful and appropriate imagery with which he clothed 
his mental conceptions. To these qualities there was added, in his prime, a cer- 
tain degree of tragedy in manner of delivery that made his utterances exceedingly 
attractive to the masses. Hearing him at intervals through thirty years, I never 
went from his service without bearing with me a sense of the shattered ideal, 
yet such was the fascination of his power that when opportunity again offered 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 375 

I could scarcely resist the desire to hear him. Such, m brief, to my mind was 
the pulpit chieftain whom two continents admired and loved in his life and in his 
death mourn as a great and good man." 

"A GREAT LIGHT GONE OUT" 

From the Hon. Joseph V. Quarles, Junior Senator from Wisconsin: 
" In Dr. Talmage' s death a great light has gone out, and the mourners are 
those who loved the light among the English-speaking peoples. When recently 
the light in Bartholdi's statue was allowed to go out, it was sadly missed both on 
sea and land by a great variety of men who came within the radius of its illumi- 
nation. The great divine, whom we now mourn, illumined a vast area, and his 
helpful influence reached many classes of men. Although dramatic, and at times 
sensational, he had the rare faculty of reaching the common mind; he main- 
tained close spiritual touch with the humble and unlettered. He did not allow 
his learning to obscure the truth or chill his broad sympathy. In expounding- 
religious truth, his style was so simple, his appeal so direct, his sincerity so mani- 
fest, that he was able at the same time to refresh the soul of the peasant and the 
savant. He was one of the great preachers of the world. Fortunately he leaves 
us a great legacy in his books and sermons, which will long keep his memory 
green on both sides of the ocean." 

HE DID MUCH GOOD 

The Hon. William H. Moody, of Massachusetts (who succeeded Mr. Long 
as Secretary of the Navy) : 

" Dr. Talmage impressed me as a man of great intellect, physical vigor, and 
power of speech. His published sermons gave him a wide reputation, and 
undoubtedly did much good." 

ADMIRAL SCHLEY'S NOBLE TRIBUTE 

" The Richmond, 
" Washington, D. C, April 14, 1902. 
" Dear Mrs. Talmage : — Mrs. Schley and I offer our sympathy and sorrow 
in this dark hour of gloom, and we are certain that the great and good God, 
whom Dr. Talmage loved, served and preached all his long and brave life, will 
comfort the loved ones in his stricken home. Peace to his blessed ashes and 
honor forever to his precious memory. W. S. Schley." 

THE AGE'S CREATEST TEACHER. 

The Hon. John F. Lacey, member of the House from Iowa : 
" I considered Dr. Talmage the greatest preacher of the age since Beecher. 
There is one thing I should like to say of him. I heard him speak many times, 



376 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



whenever the opportunity offered, and I never heard him repeat himself. This 
is a remarkable tribute to any public speaker, and especially to one who spoke as 
often as the distinguished dead divine." 

"I MISS HIS PLEASANT FACE" 

" Dr. Talmage was a remarkable pulpit orator. I shall miss his pleasant 
face, which I have been accustomed now for several years to meet on the streets 
of Washington. It always beamed with intelligence and with kindly recognition. 

John D. Long, 
Secretary of the Navy." 

THE WORLD'S GREAT LOSS 

" In the death of Dr. Talmage the world loses one of its brightest Christian 
ornaments. I knew him well and esteemed him highly; and in this esteem I 




ADMIRAL GEORGE DEWEY 



JAMES WILSON 



JOHN D. LONG, SEC'Y OF NAVY 



am sure that I was joined by thousands of my countrymen, who knew him only 
as they could picture him from reading his sermons. He and his sermons will 
be missed in countless homes all over the world. George Dewey, 

Admiral of the Navy." 

HIS POWER OF ILLUSTRATION 

" Dr. Talmage was a very attractive speaker. His power of illustration 
was almost boundless in its scope. He pleased his audiences, because, when he 
spoke, he had something to say worth hearing. There are plenty of openings 
in the pulpits of the world for men of his ability. James Wilson. 

Secretary of Agriculture." 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 377 

NONE TO FILL HIS PLACE 

United States Senator, John H. Mitchell, of Oregon: 

" No other minister of the Gospel ever held such a place as Dr. Talmage. 
In illustration of this, take my own far-away State of Oregon. Dr. Talmage 
never preached or lectured there to my knowledge, yet I venture the assertion 
that he was better known, and that his sermons were more read than were those 
of any minister residing there. This was because of his syndicated sermons, 
which were published in the Monday morning papers. They were read not only 
by church-attending people, but even more largely so by the usual non-goers, 
and the amount of good which they must have accomplished is incalculable. It 
is likely to be a long time before anyone will arise who can fill his place." 

HE TOUCHED ON EVERY-DAY LIFE 

" Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage's name will go down to posterity as among the 
foremost of those ministers of the Gospel who gained the popular love of the 
American people in the nineteenth century. While he had a rare gift of elo- 
quence as a pulpit orator, who could stir the religious emotions of human hearts, 
he was a many-sided man, whose messages were delivered in many ways. He 
was, perhaps, the most popular lecturer, to whom a welcome was extended in 
the towns and villages of the land. As an editor, he was associated with religious 
journals that are found in the homes of the people far and near. While in the 
field of literature he was the author of more than thirty volumes, which have 
gained a wide circulation. It is not often that to one man the double gift is 
accorded of moving the better aspirations of others equally by his eloquence in 
the pulpit and his thoughts upon the printed page. And if such success has 
followed Dr. Talmage's efforts, in his long ministry of fifty years, it has been 
because, as a typical American, he knew how to touch the every-day life of the 
people at large, and because, in his religious teachings, he dwelt so earnestly 
upon the Old, Old Story of Christ's life and the home truths of the Gospel. 

T. H. Y. SATTimuas, 

Bishop of Washington." 

SUPREME IN THE PULPIT 

Rev. Teunis S. Hamlin, pastor of the Church of the Covenant, at Wash- 
ington : 

" I knew Dr. Talmage for many years. I knew him when he commenced his 
labors in Brooklyn, and I preached the dedicatory sermon of his last Tabernacle 
there. I remember very well what Mr. Moody said to me after the burning of 
this tabernacle. It was being discussed as to what ought to be done about 
rebuilding it. ' I'll tell you what ought to be done,' said the great evangelist. 
' The rich men of Brooklyn and New York ought to build another great Taber- 
nacle, endow it, make it free, and then keep Dr. Talmage in it as long as he 



378 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

lives.' It would undoubtedly have been a great success if this had been done. 
Dr. Talmage was a genius. His life-work must be estimated from the stand- 
point of a genius. He was not an ecclesiastic, not an organizer, not a pastor, 
but as a rhetorical, dramatic preacher he was supreme. He made an appeal 
to the public which, in my judgment, has never been paralleled in the history 
of preaching. He commanded the popular ear as no other man in the English 
speaking world has ever done. He drew the largest audiences of any pulpit 
orator, even surpassing Spurgeon. Here in Washington, since his retirement, 
whenever it has been announced that he would speak, hundreds, yes, thousands, 
who came to hear him, have been turned away for want of room. His printed 
sermons have been more widely read than any other publications of the day. 
No novel with two or perhaps three exceptions, have reached the circulation 
which they have. Personally, Dr. Talmage was a most genial, approachable 
man. He was a warm-hearted friend whose friendship was of real worth. He 
had abundance of good spirits, an unfailing humor, and was always the life of 
a dinner table or a social circle." 

A PREACHER. FOR. THE PEOPLE 

Hon. Henry B. F. Macfarland, President of the Board of Commissioners of 
the District of Columbia: 

" Dr. Talmage leaves a vacancy of the first importance, which apparently 
cannot be filled by any one else. There are great men in the American pulpit, 
great scholars, but no one of them has the hold on the people of the country 
that Dr. Talmage had. That marvelous audience of millions who heard Dr. 
Talmage weekly through the public press was greater than any other preacher 
ever had, and no other preacher can now take it over. And beyond the seas, 
east and west, as well as in Canada, wherever English-reading people live, there 
is deep and wide regret because no more sermons can be preached by Dr. Tal- 
mage. Millions of people who never saw the preacher regarded him as a friend, 
because of the good they had received from his published weekly sermons, and 
will mourn his departure. He was emphatically a preacher — a preacher for the 
people, for the common people, rather than for the uncommon people of great 
intellectual development. The common people heard him gladly, as they have 
always heard almost all of the greatest preachers. He was an orator who spared 
no pains to develop his remarkable natural powers, and who held great audiences 
under his will. His large, strong body was the appropriate residence for his 
vigorous and versatile mind, and he had the voice, manner and the action of the 
orator. But if he had confined himself to audiences that he could reach with his 
voice, he would not have done the good nor made the reputation which he leaves 
behind. It was when he began to speak through the press and multiplied his 
audiences by the thousand, that he gained his great, his unique influence, and 
his unexampled fame." 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 



379 



HE GARNERED THE UNCHURCHED MASSES 

Hon. Edward S. Minor, member of the House from Wisconsin: 

" Dr. Talmage, in his unique way of speaking, reached more people than 

any of his contemporaries. His style was inimitable and appealed to the public. 

He was a sort of garner, and everywhere, wherever he spoke, he garnered up 

the mighty host of the unchurched. In his death, humanity lost a sincere friend."' 

CHRISTENDOM'S HEAVY LOSS 

Hon. Julius C. Burrows, senior Senator from Michigan, Dr. Talmage's 
neighbor, and one of the pall-bearers at his funeral : 

" A great light in the church has gone out, and a heavy shadow rests on 
all Christendom." 

CLOSEST TO THE POPULAR. HEART 

Representative Robert G. Cousins, of Iowa : 

" He helped to fill our world with life and love and liberality. I believe 
he was a good man, and helped tremendously the cause of progress. He was a 
great, large, natural man, somewhat erratic, but thinking all the time; more 




CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, BROOKLYN 
Where the Talmage Memorial Service was Held 



3 8o 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




REV. WALLACE RADCLIFFE 



largely read than any of the great divines, save possibly Spurgeon and Beecher, 
and therefore closer to the average mind — the millions of America. It is a 

great consolation for our world to feel and know that 
the influence of one so largely known and greatly read 
has been for good." 

A MAN OF GREAT AND VARIED GIFTS 

Rev. Wallace Radcliffe, New York Avenue Church, 
Washington, D. C. : 

" I have known Dr. Talmage for more than twenty 
years, and have always been impressed with his public 
power. He was a genius ; unique, forceful, dramatic. 
He believed and therefore spoke. He had unusual 
gifts intellectually and physically : great endurance, 
superb vigor, a voice not musical nor responsive, but 
strong and commanding, and a rhetoric extraordinarily 
vivid. His gifts gave him greater audiences by far 
than came to those who criticised. He believed in- 
tensely; he preached with tremendous power the great truths of immortality, 
the atonement, personal faith, and ' the common people heard him gladly.' His 
career has been in many ways extraordinary. He was capable of hard work 
and did it. He was a genial, genuine, earnest man who spoke his message, and 
who has gone to his reward." 

ALWAYS PLANNING TO HELP THE CHURCH 

Mr. C. L. Du Bois, Chief of Surveys of the General Land Office at 
Washington, and Trustee of the First Presbyterian Church in that city, said: 

" I was treasurer, elder and trustee while Dr. Talmage 
was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, and it was 
my privilege to know him intimately. Like everyone 
else who knew him, I loved him devotedly. His nature 
was sunny, his disposition, optimistic and he was a man 
of deep and fervent piety. As many accounts were told 
of the princely salary he received as our pastor, I think 
it proper for me to say a word here concerning it. He 
was always high-minded and liberal. He made no spe- 
cific charge whatever for his services while with us. 
The agreement was that whatever surplus was found, 
after deducting the salaries of the other two pastors and 
other expenses, should be his. The greatest amount ever 
paid him in one year was $3,500. I expressed my regret 
there was not more, but he replied : ' I do not want 
more. I never expected to charge the church anything.' " 




THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 381 

A LOSS TO THE NATION 

Hon. George Clement Perkins, United States Senator from California: 
" I liked his sermons ; liked his style of delivering them ; and always made 
it a point to hear Dr. Talmage whenever he spoke. He was, in my opinion, 
the most eminent Christian minister since Beecher's time, and second only to 
him. He had a national reputation and drew large audiences in California as 
elsewhere, being as popular there as he was in the East. In his death the nation 
has met a great loss." 

THE WHOLE WORLD HIS FIELD 

Hon. Augustus O. Bacon, senior Senator, Georgia: 

" Dr. Talmage has had a remarkable career, and one that is absolutely 
unique in the Christian ministry. No other clergyman of any denomination or 
faith has ever had his sermons published all over the world, each week of the 
year, as did he. This has been a new method of spreading the Gospel, and cer- 
tainly a most effectual one. It has given him a world-wide field, and in it he 
has been pre-eminently useful. It will be a long time before we will ever see 
another manlike him." 

Third Assistant Postmaster-General W. S. Shallenberger : 

" Dr. Talmage was easily the most popular preacher and lecturer of the past 
century. His written and printed sermons, even more than his spoken addresses, 
established his reputation. The people in most remote and isolated sections 
eagerly awaited the weekly paper containing one of his sermons, and were 
charmed by the brilliancy of his imagery and word-painting. He played upon 
the heart-strings of humanity with consummate skill and tact. Multitudes the 
world around will pay tribute to his memory." 

LAST OF THE GREAT PREACHERS 

Senator George Turner, State of Washington: 

" I had the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with Dr. Talmage, and only 
those who had that privilege could know the sweetness and depth of his char- 
acter. Every one knows that he was a forceful, brilliant orator, but not every 
one knew his sunny, happy disposition, which was a prime element of his 
strength. I regard him as the last of a class of great preachers who made the 
ministry of the nineteenth century famous." 

A GREAT MORAL FOR.CE 

Hon. Walter Reeves, Representative from Illinois: 

" Dr. Talmage was one of the great moral forces of the country. His indi- 
viduality was so marked that in the pulpit he was almost eccentric. He taught 
the highest conception of enlightened Christian life. Some of the most beautiful 
ideas of the Christian religion which I have ever had came from Dr. Talmage. 



3S2 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

I remember particularly one of his thoughts on the life after death, in which he 
likened the final resurrection to the waking of each morning, and declared that 
there were three hundred and sixty-five resurrections in each year. He wielded 
a great influence for good in the world, and will go down in history as one of the 
great moral teachers." 

HIS SERMONS A MORAL TONIC 

Judge Page Morris, Representative in Congress from Duluth, Minn. : 

" Dr. Talmage was one of the most eloquent preachers 1 ever heard. His 
earnestness was another secret of his success in speaking, every word he uttered 
showed it, every gesture emphasized it. But the good Dr. Talmage did was not 
limited to his preaching. His sermons in the Monday morning papers gave the 
Gospel to thousands of business men who never put their feet inside a church. 
An energetic, rushing Western real estate man expressed it one day when he 
said : ' I am glad that Dr. Talmage's sermons are published. I always read 
them going into business on Monday morning, and I'll acknowledge that they key 
my conscience to a higher pitch and help me to make a better man of myself.' 
No doubt but that there are thousands who could say the same." 

There were a large number of other letters and telegrams of similar 
purport. 

After the reading of the tributes, which made a visible impression on the 
great audience, the solo, " Saved by Grace," was sung by Mr. Sankey, an organ 
postlude was played by Prof. Eyre Browne, and the benediction pronounced by 
the Rev. Dr. R. S. Pardington, closed the most remarkable memorial services 
ever held in the city of Brooklyn. 

To his associates on the editorial staff of The Christian Herald, the death of 
Dr. Talmage was a personal bereavement. They missed his sunny face, his genial 
smile, his wise counsel, and his genial companionship, which it had been their 
privilege for years to enjoy. In the issue of The Christian Herald the week after 
its beloved chief had passed " beyond the smiling and the weeping, 1 ' there appeared 
the following tribute, which aptly expressed the feeling of his editorial co- 
workers : 

"TILL THEN-FAREWELL" 

" Farewell, thou valiant Soldier of the Cross. Many a gallant blow hast 
thou struck at its enemies ; yet never was there a more honorable warrior, nor 
a more generous victor. 

" Farewell, thou staunch defender of the old Book of books, which, in its 
integrity, from lid to lid, thou didst resolutely uphold. 

" Farewell, thou whose voice was as the voice of a heavenly messenger, 
bringing to the world the Gospel of mercy and pardon and peace, and whose 
splendid gift of eloquence was consecrated to the highest service. 



THE WORLD'S TRIBUTE 



383 



" Farewell, thou whose magic pen could move us to smiles or tears, to laugh- 
ter or sadness; and could cause us to throb with sympathy for human suffering, 
or to burn with a just indignation at the enemies of the Cross. 

" Farewell, counselor, comrade, chief ; thou strong leader in all godly enter- 
prise, thou friend of kindliest humor and most genial fellowship. 

" Farewell, thou stainless knight, whose keen lance was unsparingly set 
against the infidel, the intemperate, the profane, the impure, the debasers of the 
souls of men, and the enemies of the Christian home. 

" Farewell, thou faithful pastor and evangelist, whose voice has been lifted 
up in many lands to tell of Christ. Long wilt thou be held in loving remem- 
brance by the multitudes who have been led to the Cross by thy strong and tender 
pleadings. Thy heart melted toward the afflicted and the down-trodden and the 
despised of every race. 

" The record of thy life and work is written upon the hearts of men and 
women throughout the world. Throngs of the redeemed — won through thy min- 
istry — will meet and greet thee at the heavenly portals. Still other throngs will 
seek thee there hereafter. May we, when our sojourn here is over, there renew 
the sweet companionship now so rudely severed. Till then — farewell.'* 




RECOLLECTIONS OF TALMAGE 

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF THE GREAT PREACHER — STUDENT DAYS — HIS EARLY 
MINISTRY — DR. TALMAGE IN WAR TIMES — LATER YEARS — HIS JOYFUL ANTICI- 
PATIONS OP THE FUTURE LIFE 

By Rev. J. Howard Suydam, D.D., Rhinebeck, N. Y. 




Y first acquaintance with Dr. Talmage was in his student days. He 

was in the junior year of the Theological Seminary, and I was in my 

senior year in Rutgers College. Both these institutions were in 

New Brunswick, N. J., and subject to the General Synod of the 

Reformed Protestant (Dutch) Church of America. The class-rooms 

of both were in the same building. Hence the students 

were constantly meeting. In this way our acquaintance 

began, which grew into friendship and remained always 

unbroken. 

EAR.LY HINTS OF FAME 

Dr. Talmage attracted unusual attention from his first 
entrance to the Seminary. His fame as an original and 
beautiful writer, and as a signal and forceful speaker 
while in the New York University, had preceded him. 
He was in constant demand at various meetings con- 
nected with the local and suburban churches. The same 
exuberant imagination was then in full play ; indeed, it 
was at that time more tropical than in after years. He 
seized and held his audience from the start to the finish 
of his addresses. 

I recall how the people listened with open-mouthed wonder at his strange, 
and often grotesque, descriptions; and how they were unable to repress their 
hearty laughter at his wit, or their tears whenever he introduced pathos. It 
was a common remark : " Here is a prodigy ! " But whether he was to be for 
good or for evil was, with many, a serious question. His prayers were as 




REV. J. HOWARD SUYDAM, D.D. 



Rev. Dr. Suydam was the clergyman who officiated at Dr. Talmage's funeral in Greenwood Cemetery. He was 
a lifelong and much valued friend of the deceased. 

384 



RECOLLECTIONS OF TALMAGE 385 

unique as he was peculiar in other respects; they consisted entirely of a har- 
monious collocation of Scripture passages. 

FAMILIAR- WITH THE BIBLE 

I never knew one more familiar with the English Bible than was Dr. Tal- 
mage. He was nourished on it at home, which accounts for the selection of 
so many novel texts from the Old Testament from which, by his matchless 
skill, he produced such impressive discourses. 

In the lecture room, too, his idiosyncrasies were in constant evidence, It 
was the practice for the students to prepare analyses of sermons for the criti- 
cism of the presiding professor and his classmates. Dr. Talmage once analyzed 
the passage in the book of Proverbs : " Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good 
thing, and obtaineth favor of the Lord." It was a fine exhibition of sermonic 
ability. But his method of presentation did not accord with seminary conven- 
tionalities. Hence, when he drew the inference that as a good wife was a 
favor from the Lord, a bad wife must, therefore, be from the devil, Dr. Lud- 
low, who was presiding at the time, interrupted him, saying : " That will do, Mr. 
Talmage ; you may sit down." 

This rebuke was as useless as an' attempt to dam a natural watercourse. 
He continued in the same way to the last. It was entirely natural. There was 
never any straining after effect. 

HIS FAVORITE STUDIES 

Dr. Talmage had no talent for learning either the dead or the foreign lan- 
guages ; but in church history and systematic theology he had no superior in 
the Seminary. He was thoroughly familiar with the Heidelberg and West- 
minster catechisms. He knew well the Pauline, or Calvinistic system of doctrine. 
He could give exact definitions and appropriate texts from Scripture for every- 
point. Those who have followed his course for forty-six years will fail to find 
any departure from the doctrines in which he was grounded. Like Spurgeon 
and Whitefield, he deemed those all-sufficient to meet the demands of the mil- 
lions to whom, by voice and pen, he was permitted week after week to minister. 

Dr. Talmage was personally popular with the Faculty and with his fellow 
students. His lovable nature, his bouyant spirits, his charitable disposition 
made for him friends to whom he was bound as by hooks of steel. He was 
pure in life and pure in speech. He was witty, he was hilarious, but he was 
never coarse. The memory and the training of godly parents ever manifested 
their influence. His early surroundings were in accord. Somerset County, 
where he was born, always had a reputation for the intelligent piety of its peo- 
ple. It was called " the garden of the Dutch Church." 

Upon Dr. Talmage's graduation from the Seminary predictions were many 
that he would prove a signal failure in the ministry. 
25 



386 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

His intimate friends in these student days were the late Francis N. Zabris- 
kie, James Demarest, E. P. Terhune, E. T. Corwin, John McClelland Holmes 
and Denis Wortman. All these gentlemen rose to prominence in their denom- 
ination ; all were honored by the Conference of the honorary title of Doctor 
of Divinity, and all remained true in their friendship with Dr. Talmage. 

HIS EARLY MINISTRY 

I now pass from the student days to note some reminiscences of Dr. Tal- 
mage's early ministry. It was customary for the members of the senior class 
in the Seminary to preach in vacant pulpits with the view to receive a call 
to the pastorate after a license should be secured from the Classis. Everywhere 
that Dr. Talmage preached he not only arrested attention, but aroused admira- 
tion, often amounting to enthusiasm ; at the same time there was always a 
powerful minority decidedly opposed to him. He was rejected by several 
churches. His manner was so unconventional, and his composition so sensa- 
tional that the consistories of the churches feared to venture to engage him as a 
permanent pastor. For the most part he was considered artificial, and that he 
assumed these outre manners for popular effect. Never was there a greater 
mistake. It was some years before the people discovered that he was far 
more natural than most other preachers. 

HIS VARIOUS PASTORATES 

By the special intervention of Professor Samuel Van Yranken, whom he 
held in everlasting gratitude, Dr. Talmage was called to the Reformed (Dutch) 
Church of Belleville, N. J. He remained there but a short time when he 
received and accepted a call from the Reformed (Dutch) Church, of Syracuse, 
in Western New York. In both these places the congregations grew 
immensely, and large additions were made to the churches on confession of 
faith. " The Little Syracuse Boy," the account of whose life is in every Sun- 
day School library, was a fruit of Dr. Talmage's ministry in that city. 

In 1862 Dr. Talmage became the pastor of the Second Reformed (Dutch) 
Church of Philadelphia, where he followed the Rev. Dr. Berg, who had been 
chosen to the chair of Didactic Theology in the Theological Seminary at New 
Brunswick. Here he began to attract the attention of the general public, and 
gained a national reputation. I was contemporary with him here for six years. 
Our churches and our residences were situated near to each other, so that the 
friendship of our Seminary days was renewed, and strengthened. In no sense 
were we rivals; his great success never disturbed me. Here began that 
popularity which never waned until he preached his last sermon in New 
Orleans, just previous to the time when sweet death touched his eyes and he sank 
into unconsciousness to awake in his Washington home only to give a farewell 
look upon the faces of his familv at his bedside. 



1 



RECOLLECTIONS OF TALMAGE 387 

HIS FIRST GREAT SORROW 

It was in Philadelphia that Dr. Talmage met with his first sorrow in his 
immediate family. He took them for a row on the Schuylkill River. He was 
ignorant of the currents and also of the existence of the great dam, which, 
being covered with water, was not visible. The boat was caught in the rush- 
ing stream and the whole party were carried over the dam. All were rescued 
except Mrs. Talmage. The shock was terrible. The universal sympathy could 
not restore the dead to life. 

More than once have I heard Dr. Talmage say, referring to his lost com- 
panion : " She made me what I am." 

His home life then, as always, was a model of good cheer, and hospitality, 
of helpfulness and religion. It proves the strange perversity of human nature 
that this accident was made the occasion of the basest slander conceivable, and 
which had not the shadow of a foundation. This casualty left two motherless 
children, of whom I became very fond, as they were frequently at my house. 
Upon the arrival of the new mother, there seemed at once a mutual under- 
standing. She seemed as fond of them as of the five children that were after- 
wards born of her, and the affection was heartily returned. The same old-time 
life was continued, including family prayers, the Saturday afternoon outings, 
and the mutual romp and fun. 

FRIENDS IN COMPANY 

Dr. Talmage at that time never did any work after noon of Saturday. 
Many a long walk did we take together along the Wissahickon. Together 
we punched the bag, bowled the ten-pins, and climbed the bars in the gymnasium 
at the corner of Ninth and Arch Streets. We organized a ministerial baseball 
club, which included such men as Dr. Matlack, of the Episcopal Church ; Drs. 
Shepard and Morris Sutphen, and, I think, Dr. Frank Robbins, of the Presby- 
terian Church, and others of the Baptist Church, whose names I cannot now 
recall. I know we regarded it as the best example of church union we had yet 
seen. We announced ourselves prepared to meet all comers; and we had some 
spirited contests with varied success. Together, too, we availed ourselves of 
the generous proffer of the Directors to use the elegant Atheneum Library. 
It was there I was first impressed with the wide range of Dr. Talmage's read- 
ings, and the rapidity with which he seized the gist of a volume. He retained 
the contents in his prodigious memory, and, by his brain, molded them for' 
future use in public discourse. He told me that he had read everything that 
John Ruskin wrote. 

At that period Dr. Talmage read his sermons and even his weekly lectures. 
He gradually fell into the practice of using a full outline; and eventually, though 
he never ceased writing, he delivered his messages to the people without desk 
or pulpit. 



388 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

HIS FIRST LECTURE 

His first popular lecture was entitled " Grumbler and Company." It was 
my privilege, in the Spring Garden Hall, to introduce him to his first audience. 
The lecture was received with enthusiasm, and, with some alteration, it has 
rendered continuous service ever since. 

Dr. Talmage once said that six lectures were enough for any man. He 
also said that he had become so familiar with the most of his own that, while 
delivering one, he was composing another. 

Dr. Talmage awakened quite as much interest in the discussions on the 
floor of Classis and Synod as he did in the pulpit and from the platform. He 
would never . consent to examine candidates for the ministry in the Hebrew and 
Greek languages, but was always " ready " in the subjects of History, Theology, 
and Criticism. 

He once asked a young candidate, " What is most needed by a minister 
when he begins to preach?" The candidate and others made various answers 
without satisfying him. Some one then asked Dr. Talmage what he thought 
most important. "An audience," was his reply, "and that he should make it 
his aim first to secure and afterward to hold it." He himself certainly pro- 
ceeded on this line and succeeded. 

ADVICE TO THE SYNOD 

On another occasion he was a delegate to the General Synod. The ques- 
tion of the union of the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian Churches was under 
discussion. The feeling was intense: the majority were for no change; they 
spoke of the glorious history of the past; of William of Orange, and of the war 
between the Netherlands and Spain ; of the church in this country as the oldest 
of Protestant churches in unbroken continuance, and of the venerated fathers, 
etc., etc., until Dr. Talmage could endure it no longer ; but arose, greatly excited, 
and in thundering tones exclaimed : 

" Mr. President, I think we have had enough of this. We have heard this 
old history ad nauseam. The church cannot live on its past. It is the present 
and the future, that call. Let us up and meet their demands, and let Bogardus, 
and Drisius, and Megapolensis and Van Neuwenhuysen sleep quietly in their 
graves." 

DR.. TALMAGE IN WAR. TIMES 

My reminiscences of Dr. Talmage include much of the period of the Civil 
War in the United States. In the year 1862, when we both went to reside ii 
Philadelphia, the bloody contest between the North and the South was at its 
height. Not only were the States divided, but the people of the North, and 
families and churches, were also divided in opinion as to State risrhts, negro 
slavery, and the conduct of the war. There was the compulsory vacation of 



RECOLLECTIONS OF. TALMAGE 389 

many pulpits because of sentiment expressed, or implied, in sermon or prayer. 
Those preachers fared the best who frankly expressed their opinions in a 
courteous manner. 

ON THE BATTLE-FIELD 

On two occasions Dr. Talmage went for a brief period to the battlefield ; 
once in the service of the Christian Commission, and afterwards as chaplain 
of a Pennsylvania regiment. Meanwhile, with the other pastors of the city, 
he was constantly engaged in some department of beneficent service. In the 
vicinity were the camps of prisoners of war, and hospitals for the sick and 
wounded, and supply depots for the soldiers passing through Philadelphia. 
With Dr. Brainerd and Samuel B. Fales he would perform some function at 
the Cooper shop ; with George H. Stuart and George J. Mingens he would go 
to various cities to make appeals for money to carry forward the great work of 
the Sanitary and Christian Commissions. Again he would be engaged with his 
congregation in arranging for fairs and other entertainments to raise money to 
meet the cry of those rendered destitute by the loss of fathers and brothers in 
the field. This, in common with other clergymen, as zealous as he ; but when 
he brought his eloquence into play after having been on the battlefield, few 
could resist his impassioned appeals, and the money seemed to flow into the 
treasury like the waters of a mountain stream. 

"THE SUYDAM GUARDS" 

When General Lee's army invaded Pennsylvania the alarm was very great 
in Philadelphia. Some merchants quietly removed their goods to New York ; 
and the valuables of many families were placed where their owners felt they 
would be more secure. Military companies were organized, and arms were 
requested from the arsenals. At the close of a prayer-meeting in my church, 
having prepared paper, pens and ink in advance, I asked the members of the 
congregation to enroll themselves into a military company, which, as I remem- 
ber, they did to a man, their ages ranging from sixteen to seventy years. We 
then marched to the Lecture Room of Dr. Talmage' s church, led by fife and 
drum ; but we were too late, as his meeting had been already dismissed. A 
number of his congregation, however, including Dr. Talmage, joined the com- 
pany. We secured muskets, engaged a drill sergeant, and went through the 
manual of arms every afternoon in the little enclosure adjoining my church. 
Crowds of people pressed their faces against the tall iron railings to witness 
our manoeuvres ; and the gamins, apparently enjoying the suggestion of pro- 
fanity, named us " The Suydam Guards." 

MINISTERS DUG TRENCHES 

A long procession of clergymen followed the lead of the venerable Dr. 
Brainerd with spades over their shoulders to throw up entrenchments in Fair- 



390 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

mount Park. I am not quite sure that Dr. Talmage was of the company; if 
not, he was at the front. The simultaneous victories of the Federal forces at 
Vicksburg and Gettysburg rendered the earthworks unnecessary, though some 
of them remained for years. 

TALMAGE AND GENERAL SHERMAN 

After Sherman had completed his march to the sea, and Johnston had 
surrendered, the armies were commanded to return to their homes by way of 
Washington. For two days they maintained their steady march in review 
before the President, his Cabinet, and the chief officers of the army and navy. 
It was one of the most impressive scenes in the history of our country. 

In company with his elder and friend, Mr. DeWitt Moore, and others, 
Dr. Talmage went to Washington to witness this great pageant. General 
Sherman occupied the most conspicuous position on the reviewing stand. The 
guards preserved perfect order according to military rule. Intrusion seemed 
impossible. Dr. Talmage turned to his friend, and said : " Mr. Moore, do 
you see General Sherman over there? I am going to stand by his side and 
witness this review." 

In an instant he had disappeared in the crowd, and ten minutes later he 
took his station close to General Sherman and remained there. I never knew 
how it was accomplished. Some years afterward I was a guest at the wedding 
of one of his daughters. As I entered the room he rushed forward with old 
schoolboy enthusiasm, took me up in his arms as if I were a child (I weigh 
two hundred pounds), carried me across the room, and set me down in front 
of General Sherman, and said : " General Sherman, this is my old friend, Dr. 
Suydam." It was a very novel introduction; but, like reviewing the army, this 
could only be done by Dr. Talmage. 

IN LATER. YEARS 

In the year 1869 Dr. Talmage removed to Brooklyn, N. Y. A few months 
before I had taken a new charge in Jersey City, N. J. As the bird flies, the 
distance between our respective homes was about three miles — the City of New 
York and two rivers intervening. He had now entered the Presbyterian Church. 
We were henceforth ecclesiastically separated, and we no longer met in the 
church courts. 

He had now entered upon a world-wide career. He had a clear percep- 
tion of what should be done, and concentrated all his energies to accomplish his 
purpose. He labored and he prayed. His intense love for the personal Christ 
was his inspiration. 

THE WORLD HEARD HIS MESSAGE 

It seems as if he had determined to make the world hear his message: and 
he did it to an extent never before realized. He had equal success on the plat- 






RECOLLECTIONS OF TALMAGE 391 

form and in the pulpit. All predictions concerning him had failed. He believed 
in God, and he also believed in himself. He had an experience behind him 
of thirteen years of successful ministry ; he intended to make his future con- 
tribute more to the benefit of mankind than had his past. He was no organizer ; 
he left to others to plan and arrange for Sunday Schools, missions, and Boards 
of Benevolence. The one gift with which he was endowed he improved to the 
utmost. He was an evangelist; he impressed the multitude as no other man 
could. 

MULTITUDES OF CONVERTS 

His converts by the hundreds entered and strengthened other churches, 
while he gathered into the communion of his own more than any church in 
America. Statistics can never record the sum of influence emanating from a 
Christian pulpit. The Great Day alone can tell the number of souls converted, 
of wounded hearts consoled, and of broken characters reformed and started on 
an upward career by the world-wide circulation of Dr. Talmage's sermons. 

His methods must be judged by a different standard than is applied to 
other preachers, as he was of an entirely different type. 

The late Dr. Thomas DeWitt, sometimes called " the Jupiter Olympus of 
the Dutch Church," and from whom Dr. Talmage received his name, once 
said to me: 

" My namesake up the street may produce a favorable impression from the 
pulpit, but he should never appear in print." 

Like the others, so this implied prophecy also failed in its fulfilment ; for 
by his pen he has been a thousand times more effective than by his voice. 
Others will write of his millions of readers. In this respect his works will 
lollow him. His sermons will continue to produce a beneficial influence; since 
they appeal to the heart, and answer to the cry of universal human nature. 

ASSAILED BY DETRACTORS 

No man can reach the eminence which Dr. Talmage attained and escape 
detraction. The reporters seized upon his every utterance. Sometimes they 
failed to comprehend him, and he suffered from misinterpretation. For the 
most part, however, they treated him with fairness, although some were mali- 
ciously unmerciful. Quite recently he said to me : 

" There is one paper in New York which sent a reporter to my church' 
every Sunday to catch me in my words; he seized upon anything that could 
possibly be distorted, to turn it against me in an editorial in the Monday's issue." 

Dr. Talmage had a gentle disposition. Those who really knew him loved 
him. He was patient under adverse criticism when it was fair, but he was 
keenly wounded by intentional injustice. 

There were three occasions during his Brooklyn ministry when he turned 
to his early and trusted friends for sympathy, as a tired child goes to its 



392 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

mother's arms. One was his trial before Presbytery. Many of his peers did 
not comprehend him. They made no allowance for temperament. They judged 
him as a literalist interprets Scripture, ignoring its Orientalisms. Thev found 
wrong where there was no intention of wrong. The majority acquitted him of 
all the charges, and every one of that group of ministerial friends, who knew 
him from early life, would have voted with that majority. 

SENDING A MESSAGE TO HEAVEN 

The second occasion was the death of his first-born. Though scarcely 
twenty years of age, young DeWitt gave promise of unusual brilliancy at the 
bar. Dr. Talmage never entirely recovered from that blow. How like him, 
and how different from any one else it was when he said to a dying man : 

" You are going to Heaven. Give my love to my boy." 

None who witnessed it can ever forget the picture of intense grief on Dr. 
Talmage's face as, during the funeral services over his son, he rested his 
head upon the shoulder of his wife. After that event the furrows were more 
deeply marked on his forehead. 

There was one more call upon his old friends, when Mrs. Talmage died. 
In her way she was as remarkable as her distinguished husband. What an 
effort it must have cost her to speak every Sunday to the five hundred which 
comprised her Bible class in the great Tabernacle! This continued for years. 
To save time for her husband's study, she assumed the greater part of the pas- 
toral work and the social obligations. How she guarded his precious hours from 
intrusion by persistent and often impertinent callers ! Add to this the care of 
the household, and the training of the children, and it is readily seen that the 
burden was too great for her. When the last of the three Tabernacles was 
burned, the excitement was so intense that she quickly succumbed, and went 
to Heaven. Dr. Talmage said her obituary should be : " She lived for others." 

HIS VIEWS OF THE OTHER. LIFE 

Before closing these reminiscences, I wish to place upon record the indebt- 
edness of his old friends to Dr. Talmage. They had not been exempt from 
trouble. At such times — what letters he wrote! How full of encouragement 
and good cheer ! He always preached a Gospel of hope, and he exemplified it 
in himself. O, the blessedness of friendship ! 

Some years ago, and when Dr. Talmage had no spare time, I wrote in 
one of my letters : " There is great consolation in the thought that when we 
get to Heaven we will have time to stay over night." 

When in the Catskill Mountains last summer (1901), on the day the Kaat- 
erskill Hotel was closed, my w T ife and I dined there with Dr. and Mrs. Talmage. 
There were no other guests. The ladies retired, and we two remained alone 
in the great parlor. He had no church, and for the first time in years we had 



RECOLLECTIONS OF TALMAGE 393 

leisure for a conversation. We talked of former days, of our student con- 
temporaries who had departed, of their various careers, of our own lives and 
work, and many other things. Finally Dr. Talmage said: 

" Suydam, we are nearing the end; how do you feel about it?" 
This opened the way for a heart-to-heart talk. It was such as I had never 
had with any human being. He told me some of his experiences, of the joy 
of preaching, of his spiritual struggles, and of his hopes for the future. He 
said the prospect of another sphere of activity filled him with inexpressible joy. 
Speaking of new doctrines, he said: "The old faith will stand the test." Of 
his home life, he said his last years had been rendered exceedingly happy. The 
now bereft wife may cherish the comforting thought, together with the reflected 
lustre of a great name, that she made the sunset of Dr. Talmage's life very 
sweet and peaceful. 

A PROPHETIC INVITATION 

Dr. and Mrs. Talmage spent a few days at the Manse in Rhinebeck, N. Y., 
the last of September (1901), including Sunday. His brother — Goyn — had 
once been pastor there. He preached to large congregations both morning and 
evening, and with a power equal to any previous effort. His visit there will be 
historic. 

After their departure my wife said : 

" This must be repeated year by year." On the way to New York, Dr. 
and Mrs. Talmage promised themselves that they would spend a Sunday with 
us every year, if practicable, on their return from their summer home at East- 
hampton, L. L, to their residence in Washington. He then also made the request 
of his wife that if he should die first I should be invited to participate in the 
funeral services. Alas ! How soon ! To my grief and surprise, I was called 
upon to perform this sad duty on April 16th, 1902. In beautiful Greenwood, 
overlooking the New York Bay and the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean; in the 
presence of hundreds of weeping friends ; amid flowers — the gifts of love and 
appreciation from the President of the United States down to the poor negro 
sobbing at my side — we gently laid in the tomb the mortal body of the great 
preacher of the Everlasting Gospel. After a brief address, I read the impressive 
funeral service of the Protestant Episcopal Church. 



THE LESSON OF TALMAGE'S LIFE 

HIS EARLY CAREER, AS REVEALING THE MAN AND PROPHESYING THE WORK HE 
ACCOMPLISHED — DIVINELY CALLED TO HIS PECULIAR WORK — HIS WONDERFUL 
ABILITIES AND HOW HE USED THEM FOR GOD'S GLORY AND THE BETTERMENT 
OF MANKIND, 

By Rev. James Demarest, D.D. 




HE public career of Dr. Talmage might have been prophesied from the 

general make-up of the man, though it is probable that the wide reach 

of influence which he attained would hardly have entered into the 

prediction, — not because there would have been any question as to his 

influence over the masses, but simply because in this respect his career 

has been most extraordinary, and even unprecedented. 

"1 He was born a genius, and when his mind began to work 

there were abundant and striking evidences of power. 

A GENUINE SEER 

He was not a philosopher, nor a logician ; he was a 
poet — not a versifier, but a genuine seer. He beheld 
visions, and had the power to describe them with 
such vivid coloring of word-painting that they stood 
out in brilliant pictures before the eyes of those to 
whom they were exhibited. His imagination was con- 
structive and illuminating. He conceived of things 
in a unique and original, way and presented them with 
rare dramatic power, aglow with light. He had also 
the rare gift of humor, that subtle quality which it is 
impossible to define, but the presence of which it is im- 
possible not to feel. By means of it he played at will 
upon the emotions of those whom he addressed, tickling their fancy or convulsing 




REV. JAMES DEMAREST, D.D. 



them with laughter. 



BRIMFUL OF HUMOR. 



He could invest a stale story, even, with such freshness of fun, that those 
who had heard it a hundred times laughed over it as he told it as if it were brand 

This chapter is especially contributed for this work by Dr. Demarest, a fellow student and lifelong friend of Dr. 
Talmage. 

394 



THE LESSON OF TALM AGE'S LIFE 395 

new, wondering afterward why they did it. They had supposed they were done 
with laughing at that old story long ago, but his rendering of it gave it a new 
piquancy and charm. He had withal such a bright geniality of nature as gave 
a sparkle to everything he touched. 

Not only was he never dull, he was always sunny. He looked on the bright 
side of things, and flung the brightness all around him. Closely connected with 
this, perhaps accounting for it, was his genuine kindliness. He entered into 
heartiest sympathy with his fellows. The golden rule shone out in his disposi- 
tion. It was not easy to offend him. The immortal words of Lincoln, " With 
malice toward none, with charity for all," would well describe him. 

HIS FRIENDSHIP A RARE PLEASURE 

Association with him was a pure delight. It was like drinking draughts 
from a sparkling fountain, not simply, nor chiefly, for the brilliancy of his wit, but 
rather for the mellowing and gladdening influence of his kindly geniality. 
Never a word of bitterness passed his lips, never a harsh judgment, though in 
some cases it might have been well deserved. To hold a grudge was absolutely 
foreign to his nature. He exemplified that charity which is not easily provoked 
and thinketh no evil. 

Constituted in this way, one of nature's noblemen, touched with the hallowing 
influence of divine grace, he entered upon his life-work. The scholastic prepara- 
tion for it was a somewhat trying ordeal for him, especially in the matter of 
sermonizing, for it was not easy so far to curb the exuberance of his fancy as to 
fit it into the mould of homiletic rules. 

HIS FIRST SERMON A MARVEL 

The first sermon which he preached before his fellow students in the Theo- 
logical Seminary and the professor was a marvel in its way. It was a tangled 
wild-wood of bewildering mazes and unaccountable blooms ; and when he had 
finished, his hearers did not know where they were at, and the professor had only 
breath enough to gasp out : 

" You'll have to change your style, Mr. Talmage. You'll have to change 
your style." 

It may be said in passing that he did not change his style, but that the chaotic 
luxuriance of it was reduced to more orderly arrangement in the application of 
those fundamental rules of discourse which were insisted on in the training of 
the Seminary. He recognized the value of this training and was ever ready in 
after years to acknowledge his indebtedness to it. 

FULL OF IMAGERY AND DRAMATIC INCIDENT 

But this first sermon of his was marked by the characteristics which distin- 
guished his later preaching. It was full of extraordinary imagery and dramatic 



396 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

scenes. The text was Prov. 18:24, " There is a friend that sticketh closer than a 
brother." He applied the words to Christ, and among other things he described 
the departure of Christ from heaven to earth on his mission of saving lost men. 
He said that when the purpose of Christ to undertake this mission was made 
known to the angels they were astonished beyond measure. It seemed impossible 
to them. But as they came to understand his intentions, they said : " Shall ten 
thousand of us weave our wings together to make a fit chariot for Thee to ride 
upon in Thy descent to that fallen world?" but he rejected the offer with a 
wave of his hand, and said, " No, indeed ! I cannot go in such a way." Then 
they exclaimed : " Shall we bring together all the clouds of heaven, and make a 
fit throne for Thee to sit upon?" But again he spurned the offer and replied: 
" No, I cannot go in such a way." Then he commanded them : " Take off these 
royal robes " (they were robes fit for the King of Heaven), and the angels reluc- 
tantly obeyed. And then he started away from them on his descent to earth, with- 
out any of his royal insignia, alone, without a single attendant. And the angelic 
hosts, amazed, crowded out on heaven's vast balcony to see him descend, and as 
they gazed after him they talked so loud together about his wonderful condescen- 
sion and love for men that the shepherds of Bethlehem heard them. 

HIS STYLE ENTIRELY NATURAL 

This pictoral and dramatic style of his, so often criticised in the course of his 
public career, was entirely natural to him ; he could not use any other ; and its 
effectiveness in preaching the Gospel has been abundantly shown in the great 
work which he accomplished. 

As an illustration of his ready resources of wit and humor I may mention an 
incident in connection with his preaching in a country church, perhaps a year or 
two later than the preaching of his first sermon, just referred to. It was in the 
summer, and a very natural drowsiness seized the farmers when they came to sit 
down in the church after a week's toil in the heat of the sun. This greatly 
annoyed the young preacher, and he inquired anxiously at dinner of the wife of 
the pastor whose church he was supplying in the pastor's absence, whether the 
people were in the habit of sleeping in church. She said that they were, greatly 
to the annoyance of her husband, who had tried to correct the habit but could not. 

WAKING THE SLEEPERS 

Mr. Talmage determined that he would see what he could do in the way of 
keeping them awake in the afternoon. He took his text from one of Paul's 
epistles (it does not matter which one), which gave him an opportunity to say 
by way of introduction that Paul was a great preacher. This was evident, he 
said, from the fact that Paul once preached until midnight and only one person 
got asleep, and he fell down and broke his neck. If ministers nowadays, he 
added, should preach as long as that, he was afraid there would be more than one 



THE LESSON OF TALMAGE'S LIFE 397 

such catastrophe. The effect was as he desired. The drowsy men in the con- 
gregation saw the point of the joke and smiled all over their faces, straightened 
up in their seats, opened their eyes wide and kept awake throughout the service. 

A MODEST OPINION OF HIMSELF 

As the time drew near for entering upon the work of the ministry, and its 
responsibilities and duties confronted him, Mr. Talmage had his misgivings. He 
had but a moderate estimate of his qualifications for the work and would have been 
willing to accept a call to almost any obscure country church. One came to him 
from the Reformed Church of Belleville, N. J., a desirable village charge. Here 
he speedily made his way into the affections of the people, though some of the 
older heads fell into a kind of chronic quandary as to whereunto his novel style 
of presenting the old familiar truths might grow. But upon the whole he was 
beloved and esteemed by both old and young, and their attachment to him increased 
as time went on. This was fully reciprocated on his part, and throughout his 
ministry Belleville always had a warm place in his heart. It was here that he 
was made the recipient of those kind attentions which inspired him to write 
" Ministers' Sunshine," one of the papers contained in his work entitled " Crumbs 
Swept Up." 

HIS INITIAL PASTORATE 

His ministry in Belleville was an earnest one from the start. He did not 
hesitate to preach on temperance, though some of the most wealthy and influential 
families of the. parish were addicted to the use of wine and stronger beverages. 
While he declared himself on this subject unmistakably and with emphasis, he 
was yet not offensive in his method of dealing with it, and I believe alienated no 
one. He had the faculty of speaking the truth in love. He was also deeply 
concerned for the spiritual welfare of his people. 

There was one family in high social station whom he particularly desired to 
reach. The only way would be by personal conversation ; but he shrank from 
this, brought up as he had been in the country, and not feeling quite at ease in 
aristocratic society. Still he must talk with them on the subject of personal 
religion. 

A PASTORAL CALL 

One evening he started out for this purpose, reached the house, and passed 
by it, walking on some distance down the street ; retraced his steps, reached the 
house, and passed by again in the other direction; finally turned about, and his 
moral courage now asserting itself, he walked up the broad piazza and rang the 
bell. The family were at home. He told them his errand without circumlocu- 
tion, had a plain talk with them, and went his way. 

In a little time the greater number of them were received into the church. 
There was, in fact, before long a general revival, and many were added unto the 






398 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Lord. Meanwhile the fame of his preaching was spreading through the whole 
region round about. People drove for miles from different quarters to listen to 
him, and his church was filled with an eager audience. 



REBUKING A SLANDER. 

This was the state of things when he received a call to the First Reformed 
Church of Syracuse, and concluded that it was his duty to accept it. The Belle- 
ville people were extremely reluctant to part with him, and soon some unkind 
things were said about his severing his connection with the Belleville church 
after a pastorate of only three years. The gossips began to say that he was 
offered a larger salary at Syracuse, and that mercenary motives were at the 
bottom of his action in accepting the call there. 

This imputation stirred him deeply and he determined to nail the slander. 
He took a very characteristic way of doing so. On a certain Sunday morning he 
announced his purpose to go to Syracuse, and gave his reasons for so doing, 
presenting the moral considerations that had influenced him, and mingling with 
them expressions of regret at sundering the ties which bound him to the people 
of his first charge. Suddenly he said, aside, as if some one were addressing him, 
" Now, Dominie, be honest ; tell us how much more they give you up there than 
you get here?" Turning about so as to face the wall behind the pulpit, with his 
back to the people, he exclaimed, " My friend, not a dollar ! So much is offered 
me at Syracuse, and you propose to pay me so much if I stay here." Turning 
back slowly toward the people with great indignation expressed in his counte- 
nance, he proceeded with the service. The effect was startling, as he meant it to be, 
and effectually disposed of the story. His dramatic power had struck the blow 
which nailed the lie. 

BROADENING EXPERIENCES 

At Syracuse his ministry was virtually a repetition of that at Belleville. It 
was not long before the whole city was talking about him and people flocked to 
his church. His moral earnestness and his brilliancy in the pulpit produced their 
natural impression. His pastorate here lasted only three years, as at Belleville, 
and then, amid universal and profound regret at his departure, he took up the j 
work in the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia, to which he had been 
called. Naturally he gravitated toward the great centres of population, or 
rather they naturally called for a man who had power with the people. During I 
a pastorate of seven years in Philadelphia his fame spread farther and wider until | 
attention was attracted to him from ocean to ocean. 

Making choice of Brooklyn as the centre from which he would be likely tol 
wield a wider influence than from either of the other important centres of popula-l 
tion and power that were open to him, and w T ere soliciting his services, he entered! 
in this city upon the great work w 7 ith which his name has since been identified,! 






THE LESSON OF TALMAGE'S LIFE 399 

and which has added new lustre to the reputation of Brooklyn as the City of 
Churches, and of great preachers. The record which he made here while pastor 
for twenty-five years of the Central Presbyterian Church, and subsequently, after 
his removal to Washington, belongs to the world, and is part of the religious 
history of the world in his generation. 

HIS POWER. AS A PREACHER. 

Without attempting to trace this record, even in outline, the remainder of this 
chapter will be devoted to a brief study of the elements of Dr. Tannage's prodig- 
ious power as a preacher of the Gospel, as these are disclosed in the essential 
qualities of his nature manifested in his young manhood. 

First of all, let it be understood that Dr. Talmage was what he was as God's 
handiwork, from the beginning all the way through. He was the same man in 
Brooklyn that he had been in Belleville, or even before this, in his student days. 
Of course there was growth and development of powers, but nothing new was 
imported into his nature in the passing of time or the expansion of his influence. 
He was too strong and too unique a personality to be moulded by his environment. 
Some men are so changed by their circumstances that after the lapse of a few 
years it is difficult to recognize them. Not so with T. DeWitt Talmage. If 
you knew him once, you knew him always. He was himself from beginning 
to end. 

IMITATORS IN PLENTY 

This may have arisen in part from the conscious possession of great powers. 
While imitators of him were plenty he would not be likely to attempt the imita- 
tion of any one else. It may have arisen also in part from the recognition of his 
own limitations. While admiring men of noble character, and rejoicing in their 
achievements, he never sought to intrude into their domain. He knew what he 
could do, and he kept on doing it. Singleness of purpose, intensified by contin- 
uous and unremitting effort to carry it out, unified his character. He was the 
same man always and everywhere, making the most of himself as God had 
made him, and never seeking to be anything else. 

THE SPIRIT OF CONSECRATION 

Constantly dominating him throughout his whole career was that spirit of 
consecration to the Lord Christ which brought him into the ministry of the 
Gospel in the first place. Conscious of a divine call to this work, he entered 
upon it with entire self-surrender. When starting out in this service he had no 
ulterior personal aim, and whatever may have been the temptations of worldly 
ambition in later years, they never swerved him from the supreme purpose of 
serving God in the Gospel. 

These temptations were many and great, but throughout them all simplicity 
and godly sincerity characterized him. His great popularity never spoiled him. 



4 oo T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

He kept his head level ; but especially he kept his heart true. Weaker men might 
have become giddy when standing on some of the heights which he reached. 
Men of less devotion to duty and less conscious of a divine call might have toppled 
over in the rarefied air of royal and imperial favor; but the genuine stuff of 
which this man was made was superior to such influences. 

And here doubtless was one great secret of his power over men. He had 
one aim — to reach men with the message of the Gospel. If consorting with 
crowned heads would seem to lift him to a higher eminence in the estimation of 
the people, that would be welcomed as giving him a loftier pulpit from which to 
preach to a greater multitude. If anything else attracted attention to him he 
valued it not for personal aggrandizement, but as contributing to his influence as a 
preacher of the Gospel. He recognized his personality as an important factor in 
this work, but he used it with all its inborn powers and all its accessories for the 
furtherance of the Gospel. 

There was a true humility in thus subordinating himself to the glory of the 
Master, and the promotion of His Kingdom, but he had no false modesty about it. 
He believed in asserting himself as the best way to do effective work for Christ ; 
and as a matter of fact, he never appeared among men dissociated from the 
Gospel which he had been ordained of God to preach. 

There were those who misjudged him on this score. They could not con- 
ceive of his peculiar powers as being used for any other ends than those dictated 
by a selfish ambition. His sensationalism, of which they were fond of talking, 
and for which he was no more to blame than for the color of his hair or eyes — 
for it was a part of his make-up — seemed to them to be assumed and used just to 
draw attention to himself and gain the applause of the multitude. They simply 
did not know him, and apparently had no standard of their own by which to 
measure the large proportions of his moral earnestness. 

HIS GREAT NATURAL GIFT 

In aiming to fulfil his high calling in the Gospel, T. DeWitt Talmage 
brought to his work extraordinary natural gifts. These declared themselves, as 
we have seen, in the very beginning of his career. His wonderful imagination 
both startled and delighted with its creations of beauty and splendor, which 
seemed sometimes almost like fresh revelations of truth. He had also unusual 
dramatic power, which gave vividness and effectiveness to his style of presenting 
the truth. 

To these must be added that subtile power of personal* magnetism which 
enabled him to compel attention when he rose to address an audience — a power 
which all great orators have possessed, and none probably in a greater degree 
than he. This indefinable charm seemed even to attend his printed sermons, and 
must be taken into account, probably, in the explanation of why they were so 
widely read. 



THE LESSON OF TALMAGE'S LIFE 401 

It is also to be noted that he knew himself to be possessed of these various 
gifts, and was confident in the use of them. This confidence was manifested in the 
very beginning of his career. In his early sermons and addresses it was evident 
that he felt himself to be master of the situation. As time went on experience 
confirmed this consciousness, so that in the pulpit or on the platform he easily, 
and as a matter of course, assumed mastership of any assembly that he addressed. 

Behind all these extraordinary gifts there was, besides, a tremendous personal 
power. Elemental forces were stored in his nature — such forces as in the physical 
world develop the cyclone or the thunderstorm. No wonder that his utterances 
startled sometimes like an explosion, or that his appeals were driven home with 
telling effect. Great as were his gifts this power behind them was needful to 
make them fully effective, and it was present in abundant measure. He gave the 
impression, even in his most strenuous moments, of a reserve force upon which he 
had only begun to draw. The clap of thunder may have been startling, but more 
was gathering in the reservoir of the storm. 

GOD MADE CHOICE OF HIM 

Thws gifted and endowed, T. DeWitt Talmage set himself to the earnest 
work of life as a preacher of the Gospel. As we have seen, he did not make 
choice of this as a profession — God made choice of him as his minister. He 
bowed his head to the divine call, girded on the divine armor, took the sword of 
the Spirit which is the Word of God in his hand, and started on his campaign 
of conquest of the world for Christ. He soon found that it was a sky-tempered 
weapon which he wielded, and he never could be persuaded to exchange it for one 
of inferior metal. The simple, straight Gospel had been to him the wisdom and 
power of God to salvation, and he knew it would be to others. So there were 
no doubts or uncertainties to weaken his message from God to men. He believed 
in heaven, and hell, and sin, and redemption. He believed in regeneration and 
conversion by the Word and Spirit of God. He called men to repentance and 
forsaking of sin, and to faith in the Lamb of God, who taketh away sin by the 
shedding of his blood, as the onlv wav of securing the favor of God and eternal 
life. 

"THE PEOPLE HEARD HIM GLADLY" 

And men listened to this Gospel in ever increasing numbers. It reached 
their consciences, it touched their hearts, it met their profoundest needs. It is 
doubtless true that if Dr. Talmage had preached any other Gospel he would not 
have been, even with his great gifts, the mighty man he was. But he kept on 
preaching to the last the old Gospel with which he began his career. No new 
theology for him, the old was better. His career is a new demonstration of the 
effectiveness of the simple Gospel, and a fresh call to all God's ministers to 
preach it in the power of a profound conviction, and a single aim. 
26 



402 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

A CHURCH AND HOME CELEBRATION 

A celebration which the commonplace biographer might be apt to overlook, 
but one which, at the time, was of absorbing interest to Dr. Talmage was that 
which took place in the fall of 1896 at the Reformed Church of Boundbrook, N. J. 
It was the fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the church, whose first pastor 
had the gratification of receiving Dr. Talmage as a young man into church- 
membership. 

Dr. Talmage, on this anniversary occasion, took a great pleasure in revisit- 
ing the scenes of his youth. He delivered an address on the occasion, in the course 
• of which he said: 

A NEIGHBORLY REUNION 

" Among the multitudes who are gathered at the semi-centennial of the 
establishment of this church, no one can be more deeply stirred with the reminis- 
cences than myself. Your parents and mine were neighbors and friends, sympa- 
thizing with each other's joys and sorrows, and standing shoulder to shoulder in 
the battle of life till they won the day. Their prayers, their tears, their hosannahs 
were built into this structure from foundation to top-shingle. They drank from 
the chalices of its first communion. They held up their children for consecration 
at its first baptismal services. From the gates of this church they entered the 
gates of heaven. 

" I remember just where in this church the old folks sat. In my memory 
they come back and take their places to-day. In this elder's pew sat my father. 
As some of you know, he was the impersonation of everything generous and good. 
He may have had faults, but I cannot recall any. Yonder back of that pillar sat 
my dear old mother. She had reared a large household. The fatigues, the sick- 
nesses, the anxieties, the bereavements of a long life had left their marks upon 
her. She always looked tired. I do not think she got fully rested until one 
autumnal day, the leaves crumpling under foot, we carried her out to sleep in the 
old cemetery at Somerville, where together they will hear the trumpet blast that 
wakes the dead. 

REVIVING OLD MEMORIES 

" Your fathers and mothers also I well remember. I could call many of 
them by name, but will not risk the undertaking, lest I forget some of the best. 
Where are they? All gone. I see their likeness in some of your faces. The 
impression they made is in all your lives. Hail sons and daughters of a noble 
Christian ancestry! 

" There was an October day when in the lower room of this church sat what 
in the Presbyterian Church is called ' The Session,' but that which in the Reformed 
Church you call ' The Consistory.' All of them good men, the most of them 
venerable. Presiding over the meeting was Rev. George J. Van Neste, honored 
and loved by all who ever knew him. Trembling and half -affrighted I sat before 



THE LESSON OF TALMAGE'S LIFE 403 

that ' Consistory,' and had put to me the questions as to my hope in Christ, and 
my motives in joining the church. I had come to that hour through doubts and 
fears, and struggles too many to enumerate. Accepted into membership on the 
following Sabbath day, I had conferred upon me the highest honor of my life, 
the announcement of my name among the Lord's host, and though I have always 
felt myself unworthy, no power on earth or in hell shall ever rob me of that 
honor. The most of those who sat at that communion have passed over. 

" Part of the host have crossed the flood. 

And part are crossing now." 

THE OLD CHURCH HOME 

" Dear old church of Boundbrook ! Forever sacred be her walls. To ren- 
erations to come may she declare the same Gospel she proclaimed to generations 
past, and passing. We come back to-day, her long absent children, to visit her, 
and we look lovingly at the steps and doors, and aisles — up, and through, and 
along which trod the feet of a now enthroned ancestry. With my right hand 
solemnly uplifted toward heaven I tell to this rising generation the virtues, the 
faith, the self-sacrifices, the consecration of our fathers and mothers, your grand- 
fathers and grandmothers. For the most part they were a plain people. They 
came afoot to the house of God, or in farm-wagons, their horses tied under the 
adjoining sheds. 

OLDTIME HYMNOLOGY 

" Those people heard none of our modern hymnology, but when they felt sad 
they sang Windham, and when they felt joyous they sang Ariel, and when Christ 
rode through on sacramental day they sang Coronation, and when they died they 
sang Mount Pisgah. What men and women they were! The inheritance of 
religious privilege they handed down to us, we this day hand down to you. Take 
it, guard it, cherish, and if need be, like the Scotch Covenanters, fight for it, and 
on this sacred spot may God be worshiped Sabbath by Sabbath, and from cen- 
tury to century until the angel with one foot on the sea, and the other foot on the 
land shall swear by Him that liveth forever and ever that time shall be no longer." 



1 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 

AN INTERRUPTED SERMON — STARTLING HIS AUDIENCE — TALMAGE AND m'kINLEY 
— WHERE PATTI WAS SECOND CHOICE — ANCEE OF THE NEEDLES — A BOX OF 
CIGARS — MACMILLAN'S TEST OF ORTHODOXY, ETC., ETC. 



Dr. Talrnage's quickness in repartee was widely known and many incidents 
are related in illustration of this faculty. The great preacher was also a won- 
derfully entertaining raconteur. No one could converse with him for even a 
few minutes without being aware of this fact. Even in his sermons there were 
occasional gleams and flashes of caustic humor, which were all the more 
enjoyable because unique ; yet they were never ill-timed or discordant. The 
anecdotes below are gleaned from various sources, and are representative of 
hundreds of similar incidents told of the great divine. 

A SERMON-READING BISHOP 

On one occasion a young curate fresh from English fields made the remark 
in the presence of the late Dr. Medley, Lord Bishop of New Brunswick : " I 
wonder why people read Talrnage's sermons. I can't see anything in them.''" 
To this the eminent and scholarly bishop instantly replied: " I read them 
regularly and find a great deal in them." Needless to add, that curate and 
other curates in this diocese thereafter did not openly throw cold water on the 
writings of Dr. Talmage. 

AN INTERRUPTED SERMON 

Dr. Talmage, at an early period of his career, suffered from bash fulness, 
or stage fright, which caused him great embarrassment. He used to relate 
that he had no sooner announced the text of his first Belleville sermon than 
he let his manuscript fall, and put in a few awkward moments fumbling for it, 
to the undisguised amusement of a parishioner named MacMillan, who was 
of the regular " kailyard " type, and did not believe that discourses should 
be read, but that they should be committed to memory or delivered offhand. 
At the close of the sermon, however, MacMillan was won over. He went up 
to Dr. Talmage and said: 
404 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 405 

" Young man, that is the right doctrine that you preach. It is the same 
that Dominie Duncan taught me forty years ago at the kirk in the glen." And 
in truth, as far as doctrine was concerned, all Dr. Talmage's sermons were 
orthodox enough to have satisfied the " bluest " Covenanter. 



STARTLING HIS AUDIENCE 

It is undeniable that Dr. Talmage's pulpit methods were both vigorous 
and unique. Observation had convinced him that the old-time, conservative, 
machine-like preaching would not be effective in holding the attention of an 
audience. His own methods were wholly unaffected; it was as natural for 
him to act out his sermon in vigorous voice and gesture, as it was for him to 
breathe. On one memorable Sunday morning, when the time came for him 
to deliver his sermon, he walked to the extreme edge on one side of his great 
fifty foot platform, faced about, and suddenly started as fast as he could for 
the opposite side. The congregation sat breathless, expecting to see him 
pitch headlong from the farther side of the platform. But he stopped, leaped 
suddenly into the air, and came down on the resounding platform with a crash, 
calling out : : ' Young man, you're rushing toward a precipice." 

Then he proceeded to deliver what the newspapers described as a " stir- 
ring " sermon on the sins and temptations of youth in a big city. 

A CANTON INCIDENT 

A newspaper correspondent relates that soon after President McKinley's 
first election Dr. Talmage visited Canton, Ohio, and astonished the citizens 
one day by appearing in the throng of office-seekers who crowded North Mar- 
ket Street after every train arrival. He was asked the usual questions by re- 
porters after he had had an interview with the President : " What is your mis- 
sion here? Have you any candidacy to urge? Are you an office-seeker?" 
" I have nothing whatever to do with politics," declared Dr. Talmage, with a 
broad smile. " But I am a Presbyterian, and I thought that perhaps Mr. 
McKinley, being of Scottish descent, was also a Presbyterian. But it turns out 
that he is a Methodist. He is, however, a conscientious man, and I admire him 
and hope to have the opportunity of preaching to him sometimes." 

McKinley laughed heartily when he heard that Dr. Talmage had spoken 
good humoredly of his church allegiance. " Why doesn't Talmage turn Meth- 
odist?" said the President with a smile. " He might get me then, although 
my friend Dr. Manchester has first call. The change would make a good 
deal of difference to me, but surely it wouldn't make much to Dr. Talmage, who 
is, I understand, an exceedingly independent Presbyterian — almost a Congre- 
gationalist — a Talmage Congregationalist ! " 



406 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK i 

SHE PREFERRED TALMAGE 

Walter J. Davis contributes this incident to the budget of Talmage anec- 
dotes : 

I heard Talmage the first time in the Academy of Music, at St. Louis. I 
sat beside a brilliant woman, a devout woman, a relative of mine, a woman 
neither young nor old, full of the knowledge of the best of things, with a soul 
wide open to all melody of sound or sweetness of sentiment, or the moving 
power of pathos or eloquence. I had sat beside her the night before, when 
Patti sang, and saw and felt how charmed she was, as she grasped my own 
tense hand and thrilled, as I did with the clear compelling sweetness of the 
prima donna's grand exhalation of song. And the next night we had Talmage. 
To me it seemed in some sense a drop. To her it was a further ascent toward 
the glory of things. 

" Which was the greater performance ? " my cousin asked me, when Tal- 
mage had finished, and corridor, gallery and roof rang with the plaudits he had 
evoked. 

I really preferred Patti. I tried to say so, but my cousin's big, luminous 
eyes were upon me, and the magnetism of Talmage was upon me, and, against 
my will almost, I graciously replied : " Talmage." 

" Of course," she returned, " there's no comparison." 

THE ANGELS AND THE NEEDLE 

His fine imagination, and his rare sympathy with hardship and suffering, 
were probably never better illustrated than in the following incident. He was 
on one occasion in the company of some theological students in Philadelphia. 
They, fresh from the study of church history, were laughing together over the 
old scholastic question : 

" How many angels are supported on the point of a needle ? " 

They were surprised when Dr. Talmage turned to them and said: 

" Well, how many do you think ? " 

As no one answered he went on, with decision: 

"Well, I'll tell you— five." 

And he justified his answer with the following story: One very stormy 
night he was coming home late, and noticed a light in the window of a room 
where he knew a poor woman lived whose husband was at sea. He wondered 
what kept her up so late and he went to see. He found her hard at work sew- 
ing by her lamp, while her five rosy children were sound asleep beside her. 

" There," said Dr. Talmage, " was a needle supporting five angels." 

AN ASTONISHED ENGLISHMAN 

"What's the size of your congregation, Doctor?" asked an Englishman 
who met Dr. Talmage in the East. " M-m, let's see — it must be pretty nearly 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 407 

sixty million by this time, I guess," said Talmage. The Englishman, who knew 
nothing about the sermon syndicate, had a bad quarter of an hour's mental 
wrestling, and then said, timidly: 

" But, my dear Doctor, the seating capacity of your church is not more 
than a few thousand?'' 

(i Oh," said Dr. Talmage, " I dare say that many of the people to whom I 
preach never see the inside of a church door." 

The Englishman was more bewildered than ever until Dr. Talmage ex- 
plained to him that the vast majority of his congregation were people who had 
few church privileges in the sections in which they resided, and who read his 
sermons in the newspapers. 

A TEST OF ORTHODOXY 

Still another incident is related in connection with MacMillan, the stern 
old parishioner at Belleville, N. J. Dr. Talmage's orthodoxy, sharply con- 
trasted as it was with his unusual and novel personal pulpit style, won for him 
hosts of adherents throughout the English-speaking world among the readers 
of his sermons. In relating his own early experiences, Dr. Talmage used to say 
that one of his earliest friends was won to him by his " uncompromising ortho- 
doxy." After he had preached his first sermon at his first charge, at Belle- 
ville, N. J., MacMillan called on him and said: " I come to welcome you as a 
minister of the new covenant. What catechism do you study? " 

" Westminster," replied Talmage. 

"Praise God for that," said the Scotchman. " I think you must belong to 
the good old orthodox out-and-out Calvinistic school. I would not like to sug- 
gest, but if perfectly convenient, give us next Sunday a solid sermon about the 
eternal decrees. Good-night. I must sing a Psalm of David with the children 
before they go to bed." 

WHY HE QUITTED THE LAW 

An attack was made on Dr. Talmage many years ago by a publication 
which asserted that he quitted law and became a minister merely because " the 
life was easier and there was more money in it." " The life is harder and there 
is less money in it," commented the famous preacher. " I never in my youth 
had the slightest intention of entering the ministry. But, one day, when I was 
a budding lawyer, I attended a revival service. The preacher said that, under 
the law, we were dead in trespasses and sins. My little insight into law prac- 
tice" —and here his eyes would twinkle — " had taught me too much about the 
law to enable me to combat the statement successfully. When I went home 
there began the most terrible scrimmage between the law and the Gospel that 
was ever fought, and, the first thing I knew, the Gospel had won, and I bade 
good-bye to the law and, instead of being a humdrum dead lawyer, I am, my 



408 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

friends tell me, a live preacher. But it is not generally known that I represent 
in my one personality both the conflicting elements, the law and the Gospel.'' 

AN ELUSIVE SERMON 

To his intimate friends, Dr. Talmage often related amusing incidents in 
his career, but probably none seemed at the time to be more trying than the 
following : 

One Sunday night, after he had opened the service, he drew his manu- 
script from an inside pocket of his frock coat, intending to lay it inside the 
Bible when he arose to announce the next hymn. As he got up from his seat, 
he rested the hand in which he held the copied sermon on the back of the 
sofa, which was about six inches from the wall, and in some way the roll slipped 
from his grasp and fell to the floor behind the piece of furniture. The mishap 
disconcerted him for a moment, but recovering his self-possession, he gave the 
number of the hymn and, as was his custom, read it through before resuming 
his seat. He then bethought himself as to how he was going to recover the lost 
manuscript. To attempt to proceed without it, he considered, was out of the 
question. He thought of calling the sexton, but that would attract attention, 
and he hesitated to let his predicament be known. 

The situation was not a pleasant one, to say the least, and the preacher had 
little time left to find a way out of the dilemma, for by this time the hymn was 
nearly ended, and it was the one that just preceded his discourse. Finally he 
decided that there was only one course open to him, undignified as it was, and 
that was to crawl under the sofa himself. Although there was no way of 
avoiding the gaze of the elders and deacons, he found that the pulpit would 
screen him from the view of the congregation. So, dropping on his hands and 
knees, he began to scramble after the manuscript. It was awkward work, both 
because of his height and the fact that the sofa was very wide ; and he had to 
crawl all the way under it to get the elusive roll of manuscript. He secured 
the precious copy, however, and when the singing ceased he was ready to begin 
his sermon. 

POKING FUN AT AN AGNOSTIC 

Some of his friends were talking about Ingersoll, and lamenting the harm 
he was doing to the churches. All assented, except Dr. Talmage. " He is 
keeping many young men from joining the church," said one of the party. Again 
Talmage was the sole dissenter. Said another: " If he goes on like this he will 
empty the churches, and then what will the ministers do ? " 

This was more than Dr. Talmage could stand. " Empty the churches,'* 
he exclaimed. " Why, he'll fill them. If any thinking man wants to get into 
a frame of mind that will drive him back to the comfort and the shelter of 
religion, of the church, all he needs to do is to take a course of what thev are 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 409 

beginning to call Ingersollism. Ingersoll is supposed to be the devil's chief 
recruiting agent on earth, but he is nothing of the kind. People only go to hear 
him in order to be entertained and amused. Ingersoll is only a wit. He is 
merely a cheap scoffer. He doesn't do any harm to religion. I repeat, he is 
populating the churches instead of depopulating them. It's easy enough to 
laugh. A man can laugh at his grandmother. Ingersoll ' attacking ' the Bible 
is like a green grasshopper chirping and sawing away on a railway track, 
denouncing the steam engine, when the express comes thundering along. The 
grasshopper can't stay the express, and Ingersoll can't stop the truth. He 
can't even derail it." 

A PROFESSORS QUEER. BLUNDER 

It is still a tradition in Herzog Hall Theological Seminary, New Bruns- 
wick, where Dr. Talmage graduated, that the then president, upon one occa- 
sion took the young student aside, and very gravely said: 

" I never like to discourage anybody, and I rarely say what I am going to 
say to you. You are intellectually bright. I can easily imagine that you might 
make a success in almost any field of life except in preaching the Gospel. But, 
frankly and in all kindness, I must tell you that I solemnly think you have mis- 
taken your calling. Get a position selling goods behind a dry-goods counter, 
or take a clerkship in a law office, or, if necessary, follow the plow, but do not 
think of becoming the pastor of a church. You are not fitted for it at all. It 
is a great mistake for you to waste your time." 

Young Talmage simply insisted that he would go on and graduate. He 
did. And before his pulpit career was ended he had preached to thousands 
where the venerable professor had preached to one. 

DR.. TALMAGE ON MR. BEECHER 

Dr. Talmage (said a writer in The Advance of Chicago) was a loyal 
friend. In the dark days of the Plymouth pastor, he stood firm as a rock when 
the faith of other friends failed. At the funeral services on the day when the Rev. 
Mr. Beecher was buried, Dr. Talmage was called upon for an address. Mr. 
Talmage opened his remarks with these words, which the writer has never for- 
gotten : 

" One of the noblest things about our human nature is that which prompts 
us to say nothing but good of the dead. And one of the meanest things about 
our human nature is that which prompts us to wait until they are dead before 
we say it." 

MORE FIRE NEEDED IN THE SERMON 

Dr. Talmage, on one occasion, had listened patiently to a sermon delivered 
by a young minister. The preacher, who beforehand heard that the great pulpit 
orator was to be one of his hearers, made the effort of his life. He went deeply 



410 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

into a difficult theological subject, reading his sermon from manuscript before 
him. Indeed, his subject was so profoundly doctrinal that he could not afford 
to wander from his text, or to embellish it with oratoral display either by 
gesture or voice. The young preacher met Dr. Talmage after the service and 
said to him: " Doctor, I should feel it a great honor if you would criticise my 
sermon." 

" My dear young man, you should either put more fire into your sermons 
or put the sermons into the fire," was the doctor's terse comment. 

The lesson was not wasted, for the young preacher, it is said, profited by 
the valuable hint dropped by the eloquent divine. 

AS A FISHERMAN 

" At East Hampton, Long Island, where 1 go in the summer, out on the 
bluffs some mornings we see the flags up, and that is the signal for launching 
out into the deep. For a mile, the water is tinged with that peculiar color that 
indicates whole schools of piscatorial revelry, and the beach swarms with men 
with their coats off, and their sea-caps on, and those of us who do not go out on 
the waves stand on the beach ready to rejoice when the boats come back, and in 
the excitement we rush into the water with our shoes on to help get the boats 
up the beach, and we lay hold of the lines and pull till we are red in the face, 
and as the living things of the deep come tumbling in on the sand, we cry out, 
' Captain, how many? ' and he answers, ' About fifty thousand/ and we shout to 
the late comers, ' Hurrah, fifty thousand.' " 

TALMAGE AND GREELEY 

"Mr. Greeley, at my own table, ten days before his nomination at Cincinnati, 
told me that he had not had a sound sleep in fifteen years. I said to him, ' \\ ny 
do you sit in your room writing, with your hand up at that elevation, on a board 
raised to that point ? ' ' Well,' he said, ' I have so much work to do, that I must 
not have my chest cramped at all. I must keep all my faculties of body and 
mind in full play, or I cannot get on.' During the Civil War, in connection with 
his editorial work, almost every evening you might have seen him on the rail-car 
going out to meet a lecturing engagement. He was writing articles for other 
journals besides his own. He was preparing a history of the war, which history 
might have taken the exclusive time of any other man for two or three years. 
People say political disappointment killed him. I do not believe it, unless it is 
on the principle that it is the last straw that breaks the camel's back. A man 
with his magnificent cerebral development would not have been overthrown 
in that way ; it was because for twenty years he had been giving his frame the 
death blow with his own pen — extreme work, work which he did conscien- 
tiously, but it was overwork. Work is good, but too much work is death." 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 411 

MR. MOODY'S COUNSEL ABOUT PRINTED SERMONS 

" The last word that Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist, said to me at 
Plainfield, N. J., and he repeated the message to me to others, was: ' Never be 
tempted under any circumstances to give up your weekly publication of sermons 
throughout the world.' That solemn charge I will heed as long as I have 
strength to give them and the newspaper types desire to take them." 

IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOUTH 

"The whole impression of my Southern journey was one of encouragement. 
The great masses of the people are right. If half a dozen politicians at the North, 
and half a dozen politicians at the South would only consent to die, there would 
be no more sectional acrimony. You see it is a mere case for undertakers ! If 
they will bury out of sight these few demagogues, we will pay all the expense 
of catafalque and epitaph, and of a brass band to play the ' Rogues' March ! ' 

" In time, under God, this will all be settled. The generation that follows 
us will not share in the antipathies and the bellicose spirit of their ancestors, 
and they will stand in amazement at the state of things which made the national 
cemeteries at Murfreesboro and Gettysburg and Richmond an awful possi- 
bility." 

DR. TALMAGE AND THE INFIDEL BOOK 

" I had one book in my library of which I have never thought with any 
comfort. It was an infidel book, which I bought for the purpose of finding out 
the arguments against Christianity. A gentleman in my library one day said, 
'Can I borrow that book?' I said, 'Certainly.' That book came back with 
some passages marked as having especially impressed him, and when I heard 
that he had gone down in a shipwreck off Cape Hatteras, I asked myself the 
question, ' I wonder if anything he saw in that book which he borrowed from 
me could have affected his eternal destiny ? ' " 

DR. TALMAGE AT ANTIETAM 

" I walked across the field of Antietam just after the conflict. The scene 
was so sickening I shall not describe it. Every valuable thing had been taken 
from the bodies of the dead, for there are always vultures hovering over and 
around about an army, and they pick up the watches, and the memorandum 
books, and the letters, and the photographs, and the hats, and the coats, applying 
them to their own uses. The dead made no resistance. 

" I went into the hospital after the battle, and I said to a man, ' Where are 
you hurt ? ' He made no answer, but held up his arm, swollen and splintered. 
I saw where he was hurt. The simple fact is, when a man has a wounded soul, 
all he has to do is to hold it up before a sympathetic Lord and get it healed." 



412 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

AN ORATORICAL TEST 

When in a reminiscent humor, Dr. Talmage related this anecdote of his 
young manhood experience, for the benefit of the budding orators of to-day : 

" When a young man, I belonged to a debating club. It was a rule of the 
club to devote one evening a month to extemporaneous addresses on a topic not 
to be announced, even to the speaker, until the moment of delivery. None of us 
knew what we might have to talk about, but we were expected to get up and 
say something anyway without hesitating about it. 

" One night it came my turn, and when the president announced, ' Mr. Tal- 
mage will now address us on the influence of the moon upon vegetation; I fell 
as though I had been struck with a baseball bat. But I rose, pulled up my collar 
and made a speech. I don't remember what I said, but it was as full of seri- 
ous, fine-spun resounding phrases as though I had been a scientific professor 
fresh from the study of the subject, and it passed muster. After that experience, 
I felt quite equal to speaking offhand on anything.'' 

A WORD TO ASSAILANTS 

Though Dr. Talmage did not reply in kind to those who criticised him 
abusively, he sometimes spoke of them very bluntly from his church platform. 

" It has come to be understood," he said on one occasion, " that at installations 
and at dedications I shall be assailed. I have sometimes said to prominent men 
in my church, ' Go down to such and such an installation, and hear them excoriate 
Talmage.' And they go, and they are always gratified! I have heard that 
sometimes when an audience gets dull through lack of ventilation in the church, 
the pastor will look over towards my church and say something that will wake 
all the people up, and they will elbow each other, and say, 'That's Talmage!' 
You see, there are some ministers who want me to work just the way they do; 
and, as I cannot see my duty in their direction, they sometimes call me all sorts 
of names. Some of them call me one thing, and some call me another; but I 
think the three words that are most glibly used in this connection are ' mounte- 
bank,' ' sensationalism,' ' buffoonery,' and a variety of phrases showing that some 
of my dear clerical brethren are not happy. Now, I have the advantage of all such 
critical brethren in the fact that I never assault them though they assault me. The 
dear souls ! I wish them all the good I can think of — large audiences, large 
salaries, and houses full of children, and heaven to boot ! I rub my hands all over 
their heads in benediction. You never heard me say one word against any 
Christian worker, and you never will. The fact is, that I am so busy in assaulting 
the powers of darkness that I have no time to stop and stab any of my own regi- 
ment in the back. 

OTHER CLERICAL VICTIMS 
" During all these years in which I have preached I have not only received 
the criticism of the world, but I have often received its misrepresentation, and I 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 413 

do not suppose any man of any age escapes if he be trying to do a particular work 
for God and the Church. It was said that Rowland Hill advertised he would 
on the following Sabbath make a pair of shoes in his pulpit, in the presence of 
his audience, and that he came into the pulpit with a pair of boots and a knife, 
and having shaved off the top of the boots, presented a pair of shoes. It was 
said that Whitefield was preaching one summer day, when a fly buzzed around 
his head, and that he said, ' The sinner will be destroyed as certainly as I catch 
that fly.' He clutched at the fly and missed it. The story goes that then he said 
that after all perhaps the sinner might escape through salvation ! Twenty years 
ago the pictorials of London were full of pictures of Charles Spurgeon astride 
the rail of a pulpit, riding down in the presence of the audience to show how 
easy it was to go into sin ; and then the pictorials represented him as climbing up 
the railing of the pulpit to show how hard it was to get to heaven. Mr. Beecher 
was said to have entered his pulpit one warm day, and, wiping the perspiration 
from his forehead, to have said, ' It's hot ! ' with an expletive more emphatic than 
devotional ! Lies ! Lies ! All of them lies. No minister of the Gospel escapes. 
Certainly I have not escaped ! 

"I FEEL LIKE A MORNING STAR" 

" In our chapel, at a Christmas festival one week night, amid six or eight 
hundred children roaring happy, with candies and oranges and corn-balls, and 
with the 1 epresentation of a star in Christmas-greens right before me, I said, 
' Boys, I feel like a morning star.' It so happened that that phrase is to be found 
in a negro song, and two days afterward it appeared over the name of a man who 
said he was ' a member of a neighboring church ; ' that I had the previous Sunday 
night, in my pulpit, quoted two or three verses from ' Shoo Fly ! ' And, more- 
over, it went on to say that we sang that every Sunday in our Sunday School ! 
And as it was supposed that ' a member of a neighboring church ' would not He, 
grave editorials appeared in prominent newspapers deploring the fact that the 
pulpit should be so desecrated, and that I came into this pulpit on Sabbath morn- 
ing with Indian dress, feathers on my head, and scalping-knife in my hand, ard 
that the pulpit was appropriately adorned with arrows, and Indian blankets, and 
buffalo-skins ; and the clergymen in that letter goes on, with tears, to ask, ' What 
is the world coming to?' and asks if ecclesiastical authority somehow cannot he 
evoked to stop such an outrage. Why do I state these things ? To stop them ? 
Oh, no. But for public information. I do not want to stop them. They make 
things spicy! Besides that, my enemies do more for men than my friends can. 
I long ago learned to harness the falsehood and abuse of the world for Christian 
service." 

THE INFLUENCE OF HIS PRINTED SERMONS 

Dr. Wallace Radcliffe, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church 
at Washington, relates the following incident in regard to Dr. Talmage's printed 
sermons : 



414 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

" I was traveling through Southern Georgia one day late in the fall. For 
hours we had been passing through the pine region and the red clay and never 
ending pine forests had grown oppresively monotonous. It was a day train, the 
coach was sparsely filled with country people who, apparently, had grown as tired 
of their short journey as I had of my longer one. At one of the little way 
stations a newsboy came in with a bundle of papers, which we all seized with 
avidity; but I was sorely disappointed to find that his stock only included the 
small county sheets. I sat down and glanced my copy over, but in a few 
moments I was attracted by something of unusual interest which was engaging 
the attention of my fellow travelers. 

" At the front of the car a man was sitting on the back of a seat in his shirt- 
sleeves, his feet on the cushions, laboriously reading aloud from the open news- 
paper in his hand. Wedged in at his side and leaning close against him were 
five or six men while in the seats in front of him were as many women, all lis- 
tening with absorbed interest and all deeply moved, for the stern faces of the men 
showed it while the women undisguisedly wiped the tears from their faces. I 
could not imagine what affected them so. I thought possibly that it was an 
account of some neighborhood disaster and I walked down to see if I could find 
out what it was. 

" To my astonishment, I found that the man was reading one of Dr. Tal- 
mage's syndicated sermons ! The listeners were so engrossed and so moved by 
what they were hearing that they did not take the least notice of my presence, 
and when I saw how deeply they were affected I went back to my seat and picked 
up the paper I had thrown down to find out what the text of the sermon was. I 
found that it was Isaiah, sixty-sixth chapter, the thirteenth verse, ' As one whom 
his mother comforteth.' Then it was easy to understand how the Doctor's 
graphic pen of sympathy had struck a responsive chord in the hearts of this 
group of listeners." 

READ IN A TEXAS SCHOOL HOUSE 

About twenty years ago, a gentleman and his wife went into the Pan 
Handle section of the State of Texas, where the former had business interests 
which detained him for several months. It was a large mining community, and 
several hundred families were living there without any religious influence what- 
ever. The wife wrote back to her home telling of this state of things. Her 
father replied by sending her a volume of Dr. Talmage's printed sermons, and 
suggested that her husband should get the people together on Sundays and read 
to them. 

The suggestion was acted upon. The children of the neighborhood were first 
gathered into the schoolhouse and a Sabbath School organized. The parents 
came from curiosity, to see what their children were being taught ; but they 
stayed willingly enough when it was announced that if they would do so that 
one of Dr. Talmage's sermons would be read to them. All of that summer, this 



CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES 415 

plan was followed and the schoolhouse was filled with the rough miners 
their wives, who were the most attentive listeners and whose subsequent lives 
showed that the seed thus sown was productive of good fruit. Only when the 
final account is rendered will it be known how great was the good his printed 
sermons accomplished. 

HELPING A STRUCGLING CHUUCH 

Some years ago, there was a struggling little Baptist church in the village 
of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, which had just completed a neat church 
edifice, but there was still a debt hanging over it. The young people determined 
to liquidate this indebtedness, and wrote asking Dr. Talmage what he would 
charge to come and deliver a lecture for them. In reply, the Doctor wrote that 
when he was paid for it he did not deliver an address for less than five hundred 
dollars, but he was always glad to help a struggling church, and if the young 
people would write him just what they were trying to do for their church, and 
just when they would like to have him lecture that he would arrange it to come 
and do so. 

The letter caused the greatest rejoicing in the little church. After further 
correspondence a date was selected and Dr. Talmage subsquently came and 
delivered his lecture before a crowded house, which netted a handsome sum 
toward the liquidation of the debt. 

HOW TO DEAL WITH CHURCH DEBTS 

Mr. DuBois, of Washington, D. C, who was treasurer of the First Pres- 
byterian Church while Dr. Talmage was pastor, relates several interesting inci- 
dents of him in connection with that part of his career. 

Dr. Talmage was a man of most generous impulses. As long as he remained 
in Washington, he was a regular and generous contributor to the Central Union 
Mission and other charities of the city. He was most liberal toward the First 
Church, and was always ready to help in every way he could. At one time 
when talking with Dr. Sunderland over the prospect of his Washington pas- 
torate, the latter told him the church was burdened with debt, in fact had a heavy 
mortgage to carry, and that the new pastor would have to expect that the pew 
rents would be dipped into rather deeply, in order to meet the interest charges. 

" How much is your debt ? " asked the great preacher. 

" Fifteen thousand dollars," replied Dr. Sunderland. 

" Oh, pshaw ! that is nothing," said Dr. Talmage cheerily, " let us get to 
work and pay it off at once. I will give a thousand dollars myself toward it." 




4i6 




DR.. TALMAGE IN LITERATURE 

A PROLIFIC AUTHOR, HE WROTE MANY BOOKS AND ALL WERE SUCCESSFUL — SOME 

OE THE MOST EAMOUS AMONG THEM — HIS CAREER IN THE LECTURE FIELD 

HIS VIEWS ON JOURNALISM, ETC., ETC 



OW that the mighty pen of Dr. Talmage has been laid aside forever, the 
literary world realizes its loss keenly. It can be said of only few pro- 
lific authors that all they wrote succeeded; yet this can be truthfully 
asserted of his literary productions. While all succeeded, some had 
a popularity that was simply phenomenal. He held the great secret of 
reaching the hearts of his readers, and whether the literary " children 
of his brain " were social, controversial, descriptive, or simply entertaining, they 
were equally assured of a multitude of appreciative readers at home and abroad. 
Originality in all things was, perhaps, the most pronounced trait of Dr. 
Talmage's character. In his literary work he scorned to borrow, though his 
own unique phrases and ideas were the prey of many petty plagiarists. Although 
his fame will rest chiefly upon his sermonic writings, his treatment of lighter 
topics was brilliant and clever. But his finest work was not among the shallows ; 
his pen could go deeply into the secrets of the heart and soul, and such was his 
rare gift that with a single sentence he could move a multitude. Some of his 
volumes, written in the early part of his career, show rare vivacity and wit, and 
give a clue to his wonderful success as an entertaining lecturer in maturer years. 

A VARIED JOURNALISTIC CAREER. 

Among the periodicals to which he contributed at various times were The New 
York Weekly, Hearth and Home, The Independent and The Christian at Work. 
About thirty volumes of his sermons have been published, twenty volumes appear- 
ing in a single series in 1900. His other works, besides those already mentioned, 
include Crumbs Swept Up, Around the Tea Table, Sparks from My Anvil, A 
Thousand Gems, From Manger to Throne, Sports 'That Kill, The Wedding 
Ring, Night Sides of City Life, The Poetry of Life, Old Wells Dug Out, 
Abominations of Modern Society and The Earth Girdled. For many years his 
revenues from his editorial and other literary work, his book royalties and his 
lectures, netted him the princely income of $20,000 a year, these figures by no 
means representing the maximum. 

27 417 



418 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

HE STROVE TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER. 

He never talked or wrote over the heads of any of his listeners or readers. 
He never sought through vague and intricate expression to gain a reputation 
for profundity of thought, nor was it necessary for him to use mere flowers of 
rhetoric to hide lack of ideas. It was his habit to speak and write on themes 
of contemporaneous human interest. His aim was to lead and urge mankind 
to find satisfaction and pleasure in devotion to virtue and the practice of good- 
ness. That he did as much toward this end as any one man could do is certain. 
They that learned to know him best recognized and appreciated the purity 
of his motives. In another part of this volume, characteristic examples of his 
varied literary style are given, many of which must stand as models of terse 
and vigorous English, and others masterpieces of emotional and sympathetic 
writing. That his work brought him material recompense in liberal measure, 
in addition to the reward which he found in contemplation of its effect on his 
fellow beings, surely did not detract from its value. Had he been avaricious, 
his pen alone could have made him more than a millionaire. His work may 
be summed up in the words, " He strove to make men better, and succeeded." 

LONG-LIVED LITERARY POWERS 

Few men in literary life retained their intellectual vigor so long. Even 
those who knew him best could detect no diminution in the force of his pen or 
speech, and no dimming of the lustre of his splendid periods, though he had 
turned seventy. His last sermons were every whit as brilliant as those he com- 
posed when in his prime. His eye was as clear, his voice as flexible and resonant, 
and his step as elastic as though he were not nearing that border-land " where 
burdens are laid down." Those last few golden years were, in some respects, 
the happiest of his life. Though they were busy years, they still left him some 
leisure. In the summer, which he usually passed at his beautiful country home 
at Easthampton, Long Island, he did an immense amount of literary work. 
He was a most agreeable host, and could recall with photographic fidelity scenes 
and events long passed, delighting his guests with such reminiscences. He was 
the personal friend of many leading Americans of the preceding half century, 
and his recollections of presidents, statesmen, authors and other eminent people 
were full of interest. Few men possessed the ability to tell a story so entertain- 
ingly. He had the keenest sense of humor, and frequently set his audience in 
a roar by his droll wit and comic mimicry. But it was always good-humored, 
and his wit, like a buttoned foil, had a point that hurt nobody. 

AN EDITORIAL SALUTATORY 

In taking the editorial chair of The Christian Herald, in 1890, Dr. Talmage 
announced his journalistic principles as follows: 



DR. TALMAGE IN LITERATURE 419 

" First of all, the paper shall have the widest catholicity. A man's religion 
is something between him and his God, and not to be made light of. The best 
way of combating Error is to proclaim the Truth. We must remember that other 
people do not differ more from us than we differ from them. A recent visit to 
Europe, Asia and Africa has enlarged our sympathies. 

" Furthermore, it is a cultivated sentiment of our life never to attack a 
Christian worker. Liberty to do things in our own way implies the right of 
other people to do things in their own way. Further, our ambition is to be 
spirited, enterprising, and, in a wideawake sense, evangelical. Poor and pious 
ought not to be characteristics of any religious newspaper. The religion that in 
the Bible is compared to fountains and day-dawn, and a bridegroom and victory, 
ought not to be stupid, inane, or insipid. We want our paper full of compressed 
news. We want the articles contributed short, cut in two in the middle, and 
set on fire at both ends. We invite all lay workers to send us all the encour- 
aging things they know of about men and women and children and good insti- 
tutions. If you know anything bad about anybody do not send it, or send it 
with all the alleviating circumstances. We mean to put the virtues of good 
people in large letters and in most conspicuous column, and their frailties in 
small type and in obscure corners, looking for honey like the bee, instead of 
extracting poison like the spider. We have no grudges to settle, and no wrongs 
to right. Do not send us March sleet, or December fog, but panels out of the 
sky of a June morning. And now, asking the prayers of all good people in behalf 
of this religious journal, and their help in its increased circulation, we conclude 
this editorial salutatory." 

HIS WORK AS AN EDITOR 

As an editorial writer, Dr. Talmage was versatile and prolific, and his 
weekly contributions, on an immense variety of topics, would fill many volumes. 
His writing was as entertaining and pungent as his preaching, and full of 
brilliant eccentricities — " Talmagisms," as they were called. He coined new 
words and invented new phrases. If the topic was to his liking, the pen raced 
to keep time with the thought. It was the same with his sermons. Once con- 
ceived in the busy brain, the committing to paper was swift and exciting. Still, 
with all this haste, nothing could exceed the scrupulous care he took with his 
finished manuscript. He once wired from Cincinnati to his publisher in New 
York instructions to change a comma in his current sermon to a semicolon^ 
He had detected the error while reading proof on the train. He invariably dic- 
tated his discourses. On one occasion, some twenty phonograph cylinders were 
prepared and the operator sat ready to take the sermon. The preacher 
declaimed oratorically, as if addressing an audience. Cylinder after cylinder 
was filled; all the twenty were used up and the sermon was still unfinished. 
There were other cylinders at hand, but they all bore someone else's records. 



420 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" Put them on," said Dr. Talmage, " and I'll speak a little louder." It was a 
hazardous experiment, but he knew the tremendous carrying power of the 
Talmage voice. When the discourse was finished, the ten last cylinders gave 
back the preacher's words as clearly and distinctly as the others. The previous 
records had sunk to a mere hollow murmur. Talmagean oratory had scored 
another triumph. 

TRIUMPHS IN THE LECTURE FIELD 

His career in the lecture field, already referred to in an earlier chapter, was 
a round of success. Few Americans have been more popular on the platform. 
He began lecturing in 1879. His first foreign lecture tour took him to Great 
Britain, where he spoke to large and delighted audiences in Nottingham, Bir- 
mingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds, Edinburgh, Newcastle-on- 
Tyne, Bradford and Sheffield. This initial success abroad was repeated after- 
ward. In the United States he has lectured in nearly every city of importance. 
and invariably to immense crowds. His best known lectures were The New 
Life of the Nation, Grumblers, Our New Home, Big Blunders and The Bright 
Side of Things. 

A PEN PICTURE OF DR. TALMAGE 

Here is a pen-picture of Dr. Talmage, written while he was in the prime 
of his activities, by one who knew him intimately, and had studied him closely : 

" Dr. Talmage is above the medium height, and well-proportioned. His 
frame is large, but he is naturally rather spare in flesh. His head is of the aver- 
age size, with marked evidence of intellectual power. He has light eyes and a 
sandy complexion. Looking into his face, you are struck with its amiability 
and cheerfulness. In conversation, it is always bright with animation, and at 
all times is a perfect mirror of his emotions. His eyes are clear, tender and 
observing, while his tone and manners are gentle and warm in the extreme. 
An invariable self-reliance and calmness and judgment in all his proceedings 
give him dignity and self-possession, but in these particulars there is nothing 
affected or studied. He is plain and unostentatious in his appearance and bear- 
ing, and mingles freely with his fellow-men. His warmth of manners and his 
genial flow of conversation place even the stranger at once on most agreeable 
terms with him ; in truth, his conversational powers are little less than fascina- 
ting. He is full of noble sentiment, poetry and humor; he looks at life with 
his " eyes and ears wide open," and he discusses both men and topics with com- 
prehensiveness and originality. He is never ashamed to show his feelings, never 
afraid to declare his opinions. Independent, outspoken, and yet generous, 
tender and sympathetic, he presents in his own disposition the most manly and 
at the same time the most beautiful traits that adorn human character. 



DR. TALMAGE IN LITERATURE 421 

BOLD AND ORIGINAL PREACHING 

" As a preacher, he has even more striking peculiarities. He is an original, 
terse, bold and eloquent writer, and a fluent, impassioned speaker. He has 
the most complete command of language, which takes forms of expression 
which are not less new than graphic and impressive. His thoughts take a 
wide range on every subject, and they are sudden in their changes, from the 
solemn and sublime to the humorous and odd. At one time he will indulge in 
a strain of the most touching pathos, and then suddenly introduce some humor- 
ous and grotesque illustration. His language is chaste and beautiful in the 
expression of the more sentimental passages, and it is most pungent and over- 
whelming in criticism and denunciation. He has sarcasm, irony and ridicule 
at his tongue's end, not less than words of exquisite poetic beauty and tender- 
ness. All of this so mingled together, and so altered in surprises, that his audi- 
ence find themselves spellbound by the novelty of style as well as the eloquence 
of the orator. His voice is powerful and flexible. He can in an instant change 
it from tones that ring out to the capacity of the largest building, to the accent 
that float in soft whispers to the ear. His gesticulation is somewhat marvelous. 
There is not a sentence that he has not some gesture of the hand, the arms, the 
head, or the body to illustrate or enforce, and still it is all done with such appro- 
priateness and gracefulness that it adds immensely to the effectiveness of his 
oratory. His face, too, has great mobility, and the changing expressions of eye, 
mouth and brow are a vivid accompaniment to his fervent words. 

" Many persons find it difficult to form a favorable opinion in regard to Mr. 
Talmage's merits as a preacher. To be sure, he puts language into unusual 
forms ; but no preacher of the day can give a keener dissection of human motives, 
or make a more masterly or eloquent Christian appeal. A half hour of his 
earnest, original discussion will give you suggestions which will not leave you 
for many a day thereafter. As a man, he is somewhat of an oddity; but as a 
preacher, he is full of the spirit of God, and every talent and every purpose is 
devoted to the work for the regeneration of fallen man. If he makes you smile 
and weep in a breath, if he has simple sayings and whimsical ways, he is also a 
ripe scholar, a clear-headed philosopher, and a Christian orator. He has qualifi- 
cations which enable him to reach and control the great popular heart, and his 
ministry is consequently one of the most marked success. 

THE SOCIAL SIDE OF THE MAN 

" In social life he is all vivacity, all goodness, and all himself. Whether it be 
eccentricity, or whether it be simply a larger share of rich, exuberant animal 
spirits than most ministers possess, certain it is that the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage 
is more real and true to genuine human nature, in social life, than most of his 
contemporaries. He seems to go down into his own heart for a gushing, abund- 
ant spring of fellowship and love, which washes out channels to every other heart. 



422 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

He follows no conventional rules, he is guided by no example; but, as we have 
stated, he is himself. This is not because he is indifferent to the force of these 
rules and examples, but because he acts from a quick, impulsive, and original 
nature of his own. When, in the glee and enthusiasm of the moment, at a church 
festival, he exclaimed that he felt " like the morning star," it was not that his 
taste induced him to take his illustration from negro minstrelsy ; but, acting on 
the impulse of the moment, he humorously seized upon a popular saying to 
express the state of his own feelings. Men of stiff propriety and starched dignity 
would not do or say many things that he does every day. With him, however, 
a free, honest, cheerful heart is much more cultivated, and impulsive and erratic 
as it often is, it is given full influence and control over his actions and sentiments." 

HIS TRIBUTE TO PHILLIPS BROOKS 

Few finer things have ever been written by Dr. Talmage than the article 
he penned upon hearing the news of the death of Bishop Brooks. He seized his 
pen and filled several sheets at express speed, his " copy " fairly throbbing with 
the impulse of his emotion, for he had lost a dear friend. This is what he wrote : 

" My mind goes back to the time when Bishop Brooks and myself were 
neighbors in Philadelphia. He had already achieved a great reputation as a 
pulpit orator. The first time I saw him was on a stormy night as he walked 
majestically up the aisle of the church to which I administered. He had come 
to hear his neighbor, as I often afterward went to hear him. What a great, 
and genial soul he was ! He was a style of man that people in the street stopped 
to look at, and strangers would say as he passed, ' I wonder who that man is ? ' 
Of unusual height of stature, and with a face beaming with kindliness, once 
seeing him he was always remembered. But the pulpit was his throne. With 
a velocity of utterance that was the despair of swiftest stenographers, he poured 
forth his impassioned soul, making every theme h^ touched luminous and radiant. 

" All the world knows what he thought about everything that is worthy of 
thought. Putting no emphasis on the mere technicalities of religion, he made his 
pulpit flame his power. He was the especial inspiration of young men, and the 
disheartened took courage under the touch of his words and rose up healed. It 
will take all time and all eternity to tell the results of his Christian utterances. 

" But the giant is dead. He puts off the robes of the Bishopric and puts on 
the robes of eternal triumph. We hail the conqueror ! The salutations of heaven 
met him at the gate. Honored on earth, he is crowned in heaven. Other men 
have been adorned by the office of a bishop ; he adorned the office. We are glad 
that we ever knew him, that we ever heard him, and that for many years we 
have loved him. There were some who thought that there was here and there 
an unsafe spot in his theology. As for ourselves, we never found anything in the 
man or in his utterances that we did not like. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is 
kindness, and Phillips Brooks was as grand an exponent of that as any man we 



DR. TALMAGE IN LITERATURE 423 

ever knew. All intelligent Christendom mourns his going. We shall not see 
his like again. His name will be held in everlasting remembrance." 

THE MISSION OF NEWSPAPERS 

Dr. Talmage had some strikingly original ideas on the mission of the news- 
paper press. He believed that it was, in a sense, a divine mission. On this sub- 
ject he said: 

" China has at Pekin a newspaper that has been printed every week for one 
thousand years, printed on silk. Rome published the Acta Diuma, in the same 
column putting fires, murders, marriages, and tempests. England, under Queen 
Elizabeth, first published the news of the Spanish Armada, and had enough enter- 
prise, when the battle of Waterloo was fought, deciding the destiny of Europe, 
to give it one-third of a column in the London Morning Chronicle, about as much 
as the newspaper of our day gives of a small fire. America had Benjamin Har- 
ris's first weekly paper called Public Occurrences, published in Boston in 1690, 
and its first daily, the American Advertiser, published in Philadelphia in 1784. 

BIRTH OF THE PRESS 

" The newspaper did not suddenly spring upon the world, but came grad- 
ually. The genealogical line of the newspaper is this : The Adam of the race 
was a circular or news-letter, created by Divine impulse in human nature; and 
the circular begat the pamphlet, and the pamphlet begat the quarterly, and the 
quarterly begat the weekly, and the weekly begat the semi-weekly, and the semi- 
weekly begat the daily. But alas ! by what a struggle it came to its present 
development ! No sooner had its power been demonstrated, than tyranny and 
superstition shackled it. There is nothing that despotism so fears and hates as 
a printing-press. It has too many eyes in its wheel. A great writer declared that 
the King of Naples made it unsafe for him to write of anything but natural his- 
tory. Austria could not endure Kossuth's journalistic pen, pleading for the 
redemption of Hungary. Napoleon I., trying to keep his iron heel on the neck 
of nations, said : ' Editors are the regents of sovereigns and the tutors of nations, 
and are only fit for prison.' 

LITERARY FREEDOM 

" But the battle for the freedom of the press was fought in the court-rooms 
of England and America, and decided before this century began by Hamilton's 
eloquent plea for J. Peter Zenger's Gazette in America, and Erskine's advocacy 
of the freedom of publication in England. These were the Marathon and Ther- 
mopylae in which the freedom of the press was established in the United States 
and Great Britain, and all the powers of earth and hell will never again be able 
to put on the handcuffs and hopples of literary and political despotism. It is 
notable that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of American Inde- 
pendence, wrote, also : ' If I had to chose between a government without news- 
papers or newspapers without a government, I should prefer the latter.' 



424 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

BLESSINGS OF A FREE PRESS 

" Thank God that we do not have — like the Athenians — to go about to gather 
up and relate the tidings of the day, since the omnivorous newspaper does both 
for us. The grandest temporal blessing that God has given to the century is 
the newspaper. We would have better appreciation of this blessing if we knew 
the money, the brain, the losses, the exasperations, the anxieties, the wear and 
tear of heart-strings involved in the production of a good newspaper. Under the 
impression that almost anybody can make a newspaper, scores of inexperienced 
capitalists every year enter the lists, and, consequently, during the last few years, 
a newspaper has died almost every day. The disease is epidemic. The larger 
papers swallow the smaller ones, the whale taking down fifty minnows at one 
swallow. With more than seven thousand dailies and weeklies in the United 
States and Canada, there are but thirty-six a half century old. Newspapers 
do not average more than five years' existence. The most of them die of cholera 
infantum. It is high time that the people found out that the most successful 
way to sink money and keep it sunk is to start a newspaper. There comes a time 
when almost every one is smitten with the newspaper mania and starts one, or 
have stock in one he must or die. 

WHAT EDITING MEANS 

" To publish a newspaper requires the skill, the precision, the boldness, the 
vigilance, the strategy, of a commander-in-chief. To edit a newspaper requires 
that one be a statesman, an essayist, a geographer, a statistician, and, in acquisi- 
tion, encyclopediac. To man, to govern, to propel a newspaper until it shall be 
a fixed institution, a national fact, demand more qualities than any business on 
earth. If you feel like starting any newspaper, secular or religious, understand 
that you are being threatened with softening of the brain or lunacy, and throw- 
ing your pocketbook into your wife's lap, start for some insane asylum before 
you do something desperate. Meanwhile, as the dead newspapers, week by week, 
are carried out to the burial, all the living newspapers give respectful obituary, 
telling when they were born and when they died. The best printer's ink should 
give at least one stickful of epitaph. If it w r as a good paper, say, ' Peace to its 
ashes.' If it was a bad paper, I suggest the epitaph written for Francis Char- 
treuse : ' Here continueth to rot the body of Francis Chartreuse, who, with an 
inflexible constancy and uniformity of life, persisted in the practice of every 
human vice, excepting prodigality and hypocrisy ; his insatiable avarice exempted 
him from the first, his matchless impudence from the second.' I say this because 
I want you to know that a good, healthy, long-lived, entertaining newspaper is 
not an easy blessing, but one that comes to us through the fire. 

THE NEWSPAPERS ARE EDUCATORS 

" Great libraries make a few men and women very wise. Newspapers lift 
whole nations into the sunlight. Better have fifty million people moderately intelli- 



DR. TALMAGE IN LITERATURE 425 

gent than one hundred thousand Solons. A false impression is abroad that news- 
paper knowledge is ephemeral because periodicals are thrown aside, and not 
one out of ten thousand people files them for future reference. Such knowledge, 
so far from being ephemeral, goes into the very structure of the world's heart 
and brain, and decides the destiny of churches and nations. Knowledge on the 
shelf is of little worth. It is knowledge afoot, knowledge harnessed, knowledge 
in revolution, knowledge winged, knowledge projected, knowledge thunder- 
bolted. So far from being ephemeral, nearly all the best minds and hearts have 
their hands on the printing-press to-day, and have had since it got emancipated. 
Adams and Hancock and Otis used to go to the Boston Gazette and compose 
articles on the rights of the people. Benjamin Franklin, DeWitt Clinton, Ham- 
ilton, Jefferson, Ouincy, were strong in newspaperdom. Many of the immortal 
things that have been published in book form first appeared in what you may 
call the ephemeral periodical. While the book will always have its place, the 
newspaper is more potent. Because the latter is multitudinous, do not conclude 
it is necessarily superficial. If a man should from childhood to old age see only 
his Bible, Webster's Dictionary and his newspaper, he could be prepared for all 
the duties of this life and all the happiness of the next. 

INFLUENCE OF THE PRESS 

" A newspaper that pictures only the honesty and virtue of society is a mis- 
representation. That family is best prepared for the duties of life which, know- 
ing the evil, is taught to select the good. Keep children under the impression 
that all is fair and right in the world, and when they go out into it they will be 
as poorly prepared to struggle with it as a child who is thrown into the middle 
of the Atlantic and told to learn how to swim. Our only complaint is when sin 
is made attractive and morality dull, when vice is painted with great headings 
and good deeds are put in obscure corners, iniquity set up in great primer and 
righteousness in nonpareil. Sin is loathsome, make it loathsome. Virtue is 
beautiful, make it beautiful. 

EDITORIAL PREPARATION 

" A step forward for newspaperdom will be when in our colleges and univer- 
sities we open opportunities for preparing candidates for the editorial chair. We 
have in such institutions medical departments, law departments, why not editorial 
departments? I know men may tumble by what seems accident into a newspaper 
office as they may tumble into other occupations, but it would be an incalculable 
advantage if those proposing a newspaper life had an institution to which they 
might go to learn qualifications, the responsibilities, the trials, the temptations, the 
dangers, the magnificent opportunities, of newspaper life. Let there be a lecture- 
ship in which there shall appear the leading editors of the United States telling 
the story of their struggles, their victories, their mistakes, how they worked and 



426 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



what they found out to be the best way of working. There will be strong men 
who will climb up without such aid into editorial power and efficiency. So do 
men climb up to success in other branches by sheer grit. But if we want learned 
institutions to make lawyers and artists and doctors and ministers, we much more 
need learned institutions to make editors, who occupy a position of influence a 
hundredfold greater." 

THE CHRISTIAN NEWSPAPER. 

" A good newspaper is a blessing as an evangelistic influence. You know 
there is a great change in our day taking place. All the secular newspapers of 
the day — for I am not speaking now of the religious newspapers — all the secular 
newspapers of the day discuss all the questions of God, eternity, and the dead, 
and all the questions of the past, present and future. There is not a single doc- 
trine of theology but has been discussed in the last ten years by the secular news- 
papers of the country. They gather up all the news of all the earth bearing on 
religious subjects, and then they scatter the news abroad again. The Christian 
newspaper will be the right wing of the apocalyptic angel. The cylinder of the 
Christianized printing-press will be the front wheel of the Lord's chariot. I 
take the music of this day, and I do not mark it diminuendo; I mark it crescendo. 
A pastor on a Sabbath preaches to a few hundred, or a few thousand people, and 
on Monday, or during the week, the printing-press will take the same sermon 
and preach it to millions of people. God speed the printing-press! God save 
the printing press ! God Christianize the printing-press ! " 





TALMAGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 

MINISTERS'' DIET — THE MASSACRE OE CHURCH MUSIC— A RECIPE EOR POOR PREACH- 
ING — THE " COUGHING BRIGADE " — SWALLOWING A ELY — A WEDDING IN THE 
CLOUDS — STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY — CITY POOLS IN THE COUNTRY 



N much of Dr. Talmage's earlier literary work, there was an element of 
wit and humor which revealed the lighter side of the great preacher's 
character. He could amuse as well as instruct. He believed in plenty 
of sunshine and laughter ; in open-air life and exercise ; in the country, 
rather than the town. His observations of the experiences of strug- 
gling country ministers (fortunately, he himself was an exception) are 
as pertinent to-day as when they were recorded. He wrote : 

MINISTER'S DIET 

" Many of the clerical brotherhood are on low diet. After jackets and 
sacks have been provided for the eight or ten children of the parsonage, the 
father and mother must watch the table with severest economy. Coming in 
suddenly upon the dinner hour of the country clergyman, the housewife apolo- 
gizes for what she calls ' a pick-up ' dinner, when, alas ! it is nearly always 
picked up. Congregations sometimes mourn over dull preaching when they 
themselves are to blame. Give your minister more beefsteak and he will have 
more fire. Next to divine unction, the minister needs blood ; and he cannot 
make that out of tough leather. One reason why the apostles preached so 
powerfully was that they had healthy food. Fish was cheap along Galilee, and 
this, with unbolted bread, gave them plenty of phosphorus for brain food. 
These early ministers were never invited out to late suppers, with chicken salad 
and doughnuts. Nobody ever embroidered slippers for the big foot of Simon 
Peter, the fisherman preacher. Tea parties, with hot waffles, at ten o'clock at 
night make namby-pamby ministers ; but good hours and substantial diet, that 
furnish nitrates for the muscles, and phosphates for the brain, and carbonates for 
the whole frame, prepare a man for effective work. See that your minister has 
a full haversack. Feed him on gruel during the week and on Sunday he will 
give you gruel. What is called the ' parson's nose ' in a turkey or fowl is an 

427 



428 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

allegory setting forth that in many communities the minister comes out 
behind." 

He had, in the course of his career, a wide experience with church choirs, 
rural and urban, and though he " never could sing a note or carry a tune," he 
appreciated fine music and was a judicious critic. He was a strong advocate 
of congregational singing and frequently emphasized the giving out of the hymn 
by saying : " Let all the people sing ! " The grand, swelling diapason of a 
mighty audience in song, awoke in him a deep and holy enthusiasm. On the 
other hand, for what he designated as " operatic church music " he had a positive 
distaste, and he employed his keenest wit in holding it up to ridicule. 

FASHIONABLE CHURCH CHOIRS 

" In some churches," he wrote, " it is the custom for the choirs at each 
service to sing one tune which the people know. It is very generous of the choir 
to do that. The people ought to be very thankful for the donation. They do 
not deserve it. They are all ' miserable offenders ' (I heard them say so), and, 
if permitted once in a service to sing, ought to think themselves highly favored. 
But I oppose this singing of even the one tune that the people understand. 
It spoils them. It gets them hankering after more. Total abstinence is the 
only safety ; for if you allow them to imbibe at all, they will after a while get 
into the habit of drinking too much of it, and the first thing you know, they 
will be going around drunk on sacred psalmody. 

" Besides that, if you let them sing one tune at a service, they will be 
putting their oar into the other tunes and bothering the choir. There is nothing 
more annoying to the choir than, at some moment when they have drawn out 
a note to exquisite fineness, thin as a split hair, to have some blundering elder 
come in with a ' Praise ye the Lord.' Total abstinence, I say ! Let all the 
churches take the pledge, even against the milder musical beverages ; for they 
who tamper with champagne cider soon get to Hock and old Burgundy. 

" Now, if all the tunes are new, there will be no temptation to the people. 
They will not keep humming along, hoping they will find some bars down where 
they can break into the clover pasture. They will take the tune as an inex- 
tricable conundrum, and give it up. Besides that, Pisgah, Ortonville and 
Brattle Street are old-fashioned. They did very well in their day. Our fathers 
were simple-minded people, and the tunes fitted them. But our fathers are 
gone, and they ought to have taken their baggage with them. It is a nuisance 
to have these old tunes floating around the church, and sometimes just as we 
have got the music as fine as an opera, to have a revival of religion come, and 
some new-born soul break out in ' Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, ' till the organist 
stamps the pedal with indignation, and the leader of the tune gets red in the 
face and swears. 



TALM AGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 429 

MASSACRE OF CHURCH MUSIC 

" The minister read the hymn beautifully. The organ began, and the choir 
sang, as near as I could understand, as follows : 

" Oo — aw — gee — bah 
" Ah — me — la — he 
" O — pah — sah — dah 
" Wo — haw — gee-e-e-e." 

" My wife, seated beside me, did not like the music. But I said : ' What 
beautiful sentiment! My dear, it is a pastoral. You might have known that 
from " Wo-haw-gee ! ' You have had your taste ruined by attending the Brook- 
lyn Tabernacle.' The choir repeated the last line of the hymn four times. Then 
the prima donna leaped onto the first line, and slipped, and fell onto the second, 
and that broke, and let her through into the third. The other voices came in 
to pick her up, and got into a grand wrangle, and the bass and the soprano had 
it for about ten seconds ; but the soprano beat (women always do) and the 
bass rolled down into the cellar, and the soprano went up into the garret, but 
the latter kept on squalling as though the bass, in leaving her, had wickedly 
torn out all her back hair. 1 felt anxious about the soprano, and looked back 
to see if she had fainted ; but found her reclining in the arms of a young man 
who looked strong enough to take care of her." 

POOR. PREACHING 

He had a kindly word for the " weaker brothers " of the pulpit and sym- 
pathized with them when they were subjected to unkind criticism on the ground 
of " poor preaching." It was not always the minister's fault that the sermon was 
poor. Coming from one so versatile and brilliant, such a defense was generous 
indeed. 

" Here," he said, " is a recipe for the use of churches which, by their own 
conduct, invite poor preaching: First, Keep your minister poor. There is 
nothing more ruinous than to pay a pastor too much salary. Let every board 
of trustees look over their books, and see if they have erred in this direction ; 
and if so, let them cut down the minister's wages. There are churches which 
pay their pastors eight hundred dollars per annum. What these good men 
will do with so much money we cannot imagine. Our minister must be taken 
in. Perhaps by some spiritual pile-driver we might send it down to five hun- 
dred dollars ; and then the millennium, for the lion by that time would be so 
hungry he would let the lamb lie down inside of him. We would suggest a 
very economical plan: Give your spiritual adviser a small income and make 
it up by a donation visit. When everything else fails to keep him humble, that 
succeeds. We speak from experience. Many years ago we had one, and it 
has been a means of grace to us ever since. 



430 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" Secondly. For securing poor preaching, wait on your pastor with fre- 
quent committees. Let three men some morning tie their horses at the dominie's 
gate, and go in and tell him how to preach and pray and visit. Tell him 
all the disagreeable things said about him for six months, and what a great man 
his predecessor was, how much plainer his wife dressed, and how much better 
his children behaved. If, after the man has had the advantage of being manipu- 
lated by three church committees, he has any pride or spirit left, better give him 
up as incorrigible. 

" Thirdly. To secure poor preaching, keep the minister on the trot. Scold 
him when he comes to see you because he did not come before, and tell him 
how often you were visited by the former pastor. Oh, that blessed predecessor ! 
Strange they did not hold on to the angel when they had him. Keep your 
minister going. Expect him to respond to every whistle. Have him at all the 
tea parties and ' the raisings.' Stand him in the draught of the door at the 
funeral — a frequent way of declaring a pulpit vacant. Keep him busy all the 
week in out-door miscellaneous work ; and if at the end of that time he cannot 
preach a weak discourse, send for us, and we will show him how." 

THE "COUGHING BRIGADE" 

Many a well-planned and carefully thought out sermon has been irretriev- 
ably spoiled by what Dr. Talmage called the " Coughing Brigade " — something 
painfully familiar to every minister. To this troublesome contingent he 
ac dressed himself thus : 

" If any individual right ought to be maintained at all hazards, it is the 
right of coughing. There are times when you must cough. There is an irre- 
sistible tickling in the throat which demands audible demonstration. It is moved, 
seconded and unanimously carried that those who have irritated windpipes be 
heard. But there are ways with hand or handkerchief of breaking the reper- 
cussion. A smothered cough is dignified and acceptable, if you have nothing 
better to offer. But how many audiences have had their peace sacrificed by 
unrestrained expulsion of air through the glottis ! After a sudden change in the 
weather, there is a fearful charge made by the coughing brigade. They open 
their mouths wide, and make the arches ring with the racket. They begin with 
a faint ' Ahem ! ' and gradually rise and fall through all the scale of dissonance. 
Brethren and sisters who took cold by sitting in the same draught, join in 
clamor, and it is glottis to glottis, and laryngitis to laryngitis, and a chorus of 
scrapings and explosions which make the service hideous for a preacher of 
sensitive nerves. We have seen people under the pulpit coughing with their 
mouth so far open we have been tempted to jump into it. There are some 
persons who have a convenient ecclesiastical cough. It does not trouble them 
ordinarily ; but when, in church, you get them thoroughly cornered with some 
practical truth, they smother the end of the sentences with a favorite par- 



TALMAGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 431 

oxysm. There is a man in our church who is apt to be taken with one of 
these fits just as the contribution box comes to him, and cannot seem to 
get his breath again until he hears the pennies rattling in the box behind 
him. Cough by all means, but put on the brakes when you come to the down 
grade, or send the racket through at least one fold of your pocket-hand- 
kerchief." 

Warring church factions were his special antipathy. " A church is divided 
into two parties," he said. " What one likes the other abhors. They feel it 
their duty to stick to it. In their devotional meetings they pray at each 
other's inconsistencies, hoping that the prayer will go to heaven, but by the 
way of Deacon Rafferty's pew, just stopping a moment to give him a shaking. 
If one wants the church built on the hill, the other wants it down by the saw- 
mill. If one wants the minister to avoid politics, the other would like to 
have him get up on the side of the pulpit and give three cheers for John 
Brown's knapsack, which is said to be still ' strapped upon his back.' When 
Elder Bangs sits still in prayer, Elder Crank stands up to show his con- 
tempt for such behavior. If one puts ten cents on the plate, the other throws 
a dollar on top of it, to show his abhorrence for such parsimony. The whole 
church catches the quarrelsome spirit, and begins to go down. One-half 
of the choir eats up the other half. The pew devours the pulpit, and the 
pulpit swallows the pew. The session takes down the trustees, and the trustees 
masticate the session. The Sunday School and sewing society show their 
teeth, and run out their claws, and get their backs up, and spit fire. And 
church councils assemble to stop the quarrel, and cry, 'Scat! scat!' to the 
infamous howlers. But the claws go on with their work, till there stands the 
old church dead and forsaken ! Nothing more nor less than a monument 
to the memory of the dead ecclesiastical cats of Kilkenny!" 

SWALLOWING A FLY 

The following incident, Dr. Talmage told the writer, was really auto- 
biographical — a leaf from his own experience. It is one of the most delicious 
bits of clerical humor to be found anywhere : 

" A country meeting-house. A midsummer Sabbath. The air lazy and 
warm. The graveyard around about oppressively still, the white slabs here 
and there shining in the light like the drifted snow of death, and not a grass 
blade rustling, as though a sleeper had stirred in his dream. 

" Clap-boards of the church weather beaten, and very much bored, either 
by bumble-bees, or long sermons, probably the former, as the puncture was 
on the outside instead of the in. Farmers, worn out with harvesting, excess- 
ively soothed by the services into dreaming of the good time coming, when 
wheat shall be worth twice as much to the bushel, and a basket of fresh-laid eggs 
will buy a Sunday jacket for a boy. 



432 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" We had come to the middle of our sermon, when a large fly, taking 
advantage of the open mouth of the speaker, darted into our throat. The 
crisis was upon us. Shall we cough and eject this impertinent intruder, or 
let him silently have his way? We had no precedent to guide us. We knew 
not what the fathers of the church did in like circumstances, or the mothers 
either. We are not informed that Chrysostom ever turned himself into a 
fly-trap. We knew not what the Synod of Dort would have said to a min- 
ister eating flies during the religious services. 

" We saw the unfairness of taking advantage of a fly in such straitened 
circumstances. It may have been a blind fly, and not have known where it 
was going. It may have been a scientific fly, and only experimenting with 
an air current. It may have been a reckless fly, doing what he soon would 
be sorry for, or a young fly, and gone a-sailing on Sunday without his 
mother's consent. 

" Besides this, we are not fond of flies prepared in that way. We have, 
no doubt, often taken them preserved in blackberry jam, or, in the poorly 
lighted eating house, taken them done up in New Orleans syrup. But fly 
in the raw was a diet from which we recoiled. We would have preferred 
it roasted, or fried, or panned, or baked, and then to have chosen our favorite 
part, the upper joint, and a little of the breast, if you please, sir. But, no ; 
it was wings, proboscis, feet, poisers, and alimentary canal. There was no 
choice ; it was all, or none. 

" We foresaw the excitement and disturbance we would make, and the 
probability of losing our thread of discourse, if we undertook a series of 
coughs, chokings, and expectorations, and that, after all our efforts, we 
might be unsuccessful, and end the affray with a fly's wing on our lip, and 
a leg in the windpipe, and the most unsavory part of it all under the tongue. 

" We concluded to take down the nuisance. We rallied all our energies. 
It was the most animated passage in all our discourse. We were not at 
all hungry for anything, much less for such hastily prepared viands. We 
found it no easy job. The fly evidently wanted to back out. ' No,' we said, 
within ourselves ; ' too late to retreat. You are in for it now.' We addressed 
it in the words of Noah to the orang-outang, as it was about entering the Ark, 
and lingered too long at the door, ' Go in, sir — go in.' 

" And so we conquered, giving a warning to flies and men that it is 
easier to get into trouble than to get out again. We have never mentioned 
the above circumstances before ; we felt it a delicate subject. But all the 
fly's friends are dead, and we can slander it as much as we please, and 
there is no danger now. We have had the thing on our mind ever since 
we had it on our stomach, and so we come to this confessional. 

' The fly was digested, and| turned into muscle and bone, and went to 
preaching himself. Vexations conquered become additional strength. Had we 



TALMAGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 433 

stopped on the aforesaid day to kill the insect, at the same time we would 
have killed our sermon. We could not waste our time on such a combat. 
Truth ought not to be wrecked on an insect's proboscis. You are all ordained 
to some mission by the laying on the hard hands of work, and the white hands 
of joy, and the black hands of trouble." 

A WEDDING IN THE CLOUDS 

If a public man be even in the slightest degree eccentric — and what man 
of marked ability is not? — there are sure to be occasions upon which certain 
newspapers will magnify his eccentricities a hundredfold. Dr. Talmage was 
frequently a victim of such exaggerations, but they gave him little annoyance. 
His perennial good humor stood him in good stead and overlooked such 
incidents. 

On one occasion, however, the misrepresentation was so unusual that the 
good-natured divine gave his version of the circumstances in this wise : 

" One day, when I was living in Philadelphia, a celebrated balloonist was 
ushered into my study. He had just arrived from New York with an invita- 
tion from one of my scientific friends who wished me to come on to Fifth 
Avenue Hotel, in the city of New York, and unite him in marriage with a most 
excellent lady of that city. The messenger said that after the marriage cere- 
mony the wedding party proposed to go up in a balloon from Central Park, the 
scientific friend before mentioned having made a costly piece of philosophical 
apparatus by which he expected to experiment on air currents as he ascended 
to the clouds. 

" The evening before the wedding I arrived at Fifth Avenue Hotel, where 
effort was made to induce me, to perform the ceremony in the balloon and 
up among the clouds. But I refused, saying that while I believed in the 
* higher law,' I doubted the legality of a wedding performed so high up above 
the reach of municipal authority ; besides that, my head is apt to get dizzy 
at a great height, and I might not be able to see straight enough to tie the 
knot ; besides that, it is very risky for any church to have its pastor go so high 
up, lest, having got so finely started, he should not return, the memory of 
Elijah flashing across me ; besides that, if I should slip and fall from a height 
of two or three miles, somebody standing underneath would be almost sure 
to get hurt. Of course, I remembered that ' matches are made in heaven,' 
but I do not believe it, for some of them are lucifer matches, and from the 
odor of brimstone I know they are made in another place. Besides all these 
objections to performing the ceremony in the clouds, the reporters would get 
hold of it ; and, as it was a dull time among them, I knew that what was left 
of me after the balloon peril they would finish. 

" Persisting in this idea, at two o'clock p. m., in the parlor of Fifth Avenue 
Hotel, I united in wedlock as scientific a gentleman and as good a lady as 

28 



434 T. DH WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

the country holds. I was invited to go up to Central Park and see the wed- 
ding, party start on the balloon excursion. Having several hours before the 
rail-train started, I accepted the invitation. The newspapers had stated that 
I would perform the wedding as the balloon was being cut loose from the 
earth — the only time I ever knew the newspapers to be mistaken ! The great 
natural amphitheatre in the park had been enclosed. At one dollar a head, 
a great assembly had been gathered on tip-toe of excitement. The house- 
tops in proximity were covered with people anxious to see the bride and 
groom and minister and balloon. It was four o'clock when I arrived on the 
ground, unaccompanied ; and arousing no suspicion as to who I was, I had 
an opportunity of gazing on the most amusing and side-splitting scene I ever 
witnessed. 

" The great balloon fastened to the earth swung and struggled and flopped, 
as much as to say : ' Time to go ; bring on your wedding.' There were ten 
or fifteen reporters present. Some of them had their pieces all written ; others 
were busy. One clever fellow, reporting for The New York Winding Sheet, 
showed me his piece with full description of bride and groom and minister, 
saying he had never seen the minister and wanted to know if I had, and if 
I thought that his description was accurate. I told him I thought that it 
was beautiful, and that if the minister' was not satisfied with that he never 
would be satisfied with anything. The balloon not being quite ready, the 
bride and groom took a long ride through the park, and it was getting 
toward night, and the reporters became impatient and demanded that the 
balloon start and the wedding begin. I quietly told one of the reporters that 
the wedding had been performed two hours before in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. 
He denied it, till I told him that I was the minister. * It can't be possible,' 
he said, 'that you went and did that in the hotel? Why that spoils all my 
piece ! Here is a long description of the whole thing as occurring two miles 
high ! What shall I do with this two columns of fine description ? Sir, I 
demand that you do something to* make this report appropriate.' I asked : 
'What would you have me do?' 'Oh,' said he, 'you must pronounce the 
benediction, or bless the people, or say a little, or do something religious ; I 
don't care what it is.' As I saw the excitement was spreading, I took the 
carriage, and by ten o'clock p. m. was at my home in Philadelphia. But next 
morning didn't I catch it ? One of the newspapers was headed : ' Wedding 
in the Clouds ! Disgraceful Scene ! Talmage Two Miles High ! Ceremony 
Away Up ! ' followed by minute description of how the minister, standing 
somewhere near the man in the moon, kissed the bride, and then sat down on 
the edge of the balloon, and looked ten thousand feet down at the golden 
sunset and the great city beneath, with all its might}' population of sentient 
people, and other things as fine as that. Some of the religious papers were 
shocked — that is, they lied ; and when religious papers do lie, they beat The 
New York Winding Sheet, for they come to the work fresher. They said : 



TALM AGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 435 

■ Here is a regularly ordained minister cutting up antics two miles above the 
clouds. We all feel humiliated. Let us pray ! ' 

" It was a great harvest for the pictorials. The news-rooms were filled 
with representations of ' Talmage Getting Into the Balloon/ ' Talmage with 
His Coat Tail Flying Over the Side of the Balloon,' ' Talmage Performing the 
Ceremony/ ' Talmage Congratulating the Bride/ ' Talmage Begging to Come 
Down Because He Felt so Chilly/ ' Talmage Spilled Out at Midnight on the 
Other Side of Hoboken, Asking which Way was Up and Down/ We do not 
remember just the words, but it was as lively as that. The balloon professor 
got all the money that was made out of the affair, but my compensation was 
chiefly religious. We got so many good lessons from the secular and religious 
newspapers about that time that we grew rapidly better, although many did not 
notice the favorable change. It put me on my guard about weddings, and the 
next time I married a couple I told them plainly that I was not responsible for 
their style of wedding trip, and positively refused to go with them anywhere, 
whether in car, stage or balloon, and that I did not care, after I had married 
them, whether they went up or down." 

STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY 

" Americans traveling in Europe (Dr. Talmage wrote from Brussels) are 
for the most part in immensity of perspiration. Starting with what they call 
' the small and insignificant island of Great Britain/ and having adopted the 
feeling of the Yankee who said he thought England a very nice little island, 
but he was afraid to go out nights lest, he should fall off, they expect to see 
all Europe in a few days. They spend much of their time at depots, inquiring 
about the next train, or rush past Mont Blanc, with no time to stop, chasing 
up a lost valise. 

" In our company was an American who had five ladies and eight trunks. 
Getting into Switzerland, he let the ladies come on to see the mountains, while 
he went back a two days' journey, asking Belgium and Germany if they had 
seen anything of his trunks. As he is unacquainted with the language, but has 
learned that das gepack is the German for the luggage, I imagine him going 
through the streets of Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Darmstadt, at dead of night, 
shouting till the people throw open the windows expecting a war-extra: 

" ' Das gepack! Das gepack! ' 

" Meanwhile we offer a little cologne to one of the unfortunate party 
bereft of their ' things,' and she refuses to take it ; and on being urged, blushed, 
and hemmed, and finally gave as her reason that she had no pocket-handker- 
chief. Alas ! her clothes by that time were on the way to St. Petersburg or 
Halifax. 

" But why sneer at the father or husband on his errand of mercy scouring 
Europe for his wife's silk dresses ? May he be prospered ! If he do not find 



436 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

the chignons, may he at least be so happy as to discover the pocket-handker- 
chiefs ! What more important than clothes? 

" As for ourselves, we carry all onr baggage in our two hands, and yet 
we have two changes of apparel a day ; namely, in the morning when we put 
it on, and in the night when we take it off. Nobody can steal our baggage 
unless they steal us. 

" In journeying from country to country, the change in the value of coin 
is apt to be inextricable. But guineas, and florins, and kreutzers, and double 
ducats cease to be a perplexity to us. We ask the price of a thing, look wise, 
as if we knew all about it, and then hold out our hand and let him take his 
pick. As riches take wings and fly away, we arc determined to lose nothing 
in that manner. Fifty years from now a Turkinh piastre will be worth to me 
as much as a Holland guilder ; and it worries me not when I am cheated, for 
the man who cheats must in the end suffer more than I, so that my chagrin 
is lost in compassion for his misfortune." 

CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY 

There is a photographic fidelity to fact, as well as a grim humor, in the fol- 
lowing sketch, which will be recognized by many readers: 

" The city fool selects the country place without reference to socialities. 
He will bring a pocketful of papers from the store, which will be all his 
family will want to know of society and the world ; and then a healthy library, 
from which shall look down all the historians and poets, will give them a surfeit 
of intellectualities. He does not know why his wife and daughters want to go 
back to town. What could be more gay? Market wagons passing the door, 
the farmers going with grist to the mill, and an occasional thunderstorm to 
keep things lively, and the bawling of the cow recently bereft of her calf. 
Coining home besweated from the store at night, the father finds the females 
crying. What better concert do you want than the robins? What livelier beaux 
than the hedges of syringa? With a very wail of woe they cry out to the 
exasperating husband and father : ' We want to see something ! ' ' Good gra- 
cious ! ' he shouts, 'go forth and look at the clouds, and the grass, and the 
Southdowns ! One breath of this evening air is worth all the perfumes of 
fashionable society ! ' 

DISAPPOINTMENT IN AGRICULTURE 

" There is apt to be disappointment in crops. Even a stupid turnip knows 
a city fool as soon as it sees him. Marrow-fat peas fairly rattle in their pods 
with derision as he passes. The fields are glad to impose upon the novice. 
Wandering too near the beehive with a book on honey-making, he gets stung 
in three places. His cauliflowers turn out to be cabbages. The thunder spoils 
his milk. The grass-butter, that he dreamed of, is rancid. The taxes eat up 



TALM AGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 437 

his profits. The drought consumes his corn. The rust gets in his wheat. The 
peaches drop off before they ripen. The rot strikes the potatoes. Expecting 
to surprise his benighted city friends with a present of a few early vegetables, 
he accidentally hears that they have had new potatoes and green peas and sweet 
corn for a fortnight. The bay mare runs away with the box-wagon. His rustic 
gate gets out of order. His shrubbery is perpetually needing the shears. It 
seems almost impossible to keep the grass out of the serpentine walks. A cow 
gets in and upsets the vase of flowers. The hogs destroy the watermelons, and 
the gardener runs off with the chamber-maid. 

" Everything goes wrong, and farming is a failure. It always is a failure 
when a man knows nothing about it. If a man can afford to make a large 
outlay for his own amusement, and the health of his family, let him hasten to 
his country purchase. But no one, save a city fool, will think to keep a busi- 
ness in town, and make a farm financially profitable." 



THE ILL-NATURED MAN 

" Of all the ills that flesh is heir to, a cross, crabbed, ill-contented man is 
the most unendurable, because the most inexcusable. No occasion, no matter 
how trifling, is permitted to pass without eliciting his dissent, his sneer, or 
his growl. His good and patient wife never yet prepared a dinner that he 
liked. One day she prepares a dish that she thinks will particularly please him. 
He comes in the front door, and says, ' Whew ! whew ! what have you got in 
the house? Now, my dear, you know that I never did like codfish!' Some 
evening, resolving to be especially gracious, he starts with his family to a place 
of amusement. He scolds the most of the way. He cannot afford the time or 
the money, and he does not believe the entertainment will be much, after all. 
He sits motionless and disgusted. He goes home, saying, ' Did you see that 
fat musician that got so red blowing that French horn ? He looked like a stuffed 
toad. Did you ever hear such a voice as that lady has? Why, it was a perfect 
squawk ! The evening was wasted.' And his companion says, ' Why, my 
dear ! ' ' There, you needn't tell me — you are pleased with everything. But 
never ask me to go again ! ' He goes to church. Perhaps the sermon is 
didactic and argumentative. He yawns. He gapes. He twists himself in his 
pew, and pretends he is asleep and says, ' I could not keep awake. Did you 
ever hear anything so dead? Can these dry bones live?'" 

HIS FIRST AND ONLY GHOST 

" I never met but one ghost in all my life. It was a very dark night, and I 
was seven years of age. There was a German cooper, who, on the outskirts of 
the village, had a shop. It was an interesting spot, and I frequented it. There 
was a congregation of barrels, kegs, casks and firkins that excited my boyish 



438 T. DE WITT TALM AGE—HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

admiration. There the old man stood, day after day, hammering away at his 
trade. He was fond of talk, and had his head full of all that was weird, mysteri- 
ous and tragic. During the course of his life he had seen almost as many ghosts 
as firkins; had seen them in Germany, on the ocean, and in America. 

" One summer afternoon, perhaps having made an unusually lucrative bar- 
gain in loop-poles, the tide of his discourse bore everything before it. I hung on 
his lips entranced. I noticed not that the shadows of the evening were gathering, 
nor remembered that we were a mile from home. He had wrought up my boyish 
imagination to the tip-top pitch. He had told me how doors opened when there 
was no hand on the latch, and the eyes of a face in a picture winked one windy 
night; and how intangible objects in white would glide across the room, and 
headless trunks ride past on phantom horses ; and how boys on the way home at 
night were met by a sheeted form that picked them up and carried them off, so 
that they never were heard of, their mother going around as disconsolate as the 
woman in the ' Lost Heir/ crying ' Where's Billy? ' 

" This last story roused me to my whereabouts, and I felt I must go home. 
My hair, that usually stood on end, took the strictly perpendicular. My flesh crept 
with horror of the expedition homeward. My faith in everything solid had been 
shaken. I believed only in the subtile and in the intangible. What could a boy 
of seven years old depend upon if one of these headless horsemen might at any 
moment ride him down, or one of these sheeted creatures pick him up ? 



A ROADSIDE SPECTRE 

" I started up the road barefooted. I was not impeded by any useless apparel. 
It took me no time to get under way. I felt that if I must perish, it would be well 
to get as near the doorsill of home as possible. I vowed that, if I was only spared 
this once to get home, I would never again allow r the night to catch me at the 
cooper's. The ground flew under my feet. No headless horseman could have 
kept up. Not a star was out. It was the blackness of darkness. I had made 
half the distance and was in the ' hollow ' — the most lonely and dangerous part of 
the way — and felt that in a minute more I might abate my speed and take fuller 
breath. But, alas ! no such good fortune awaited me. Suddenly my feet struck 
a monster — whether beastly, human, infernal or supernal, witch, ghost, demon, or 
headless horseman, I could not immediately tell. I fell prostrate, my hands pass- 
ing over a hairy creature ; and, as my head struck the ground, the monster rose 
up, throwing my feet into the air. To this day it would have been a mystery, had 
not a fearful bellow revealed it as a cow which had lain down to peaceful slumber 
in the road, not anticipating the terrible collision. She wasted no time, but 
started up the road. I, having by experiment discovered which end of me was up, 
joined her in the race. I knew not but that it was the first instalment of dis- 
asters. And, therefore, away we went, cow and boy; but the cow beat. She 



TALMAGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 439 

came into town a hundred yards ahead. I have not got over it yet, that I let that 
cow beat. That was the first and last ghost I ever met." 

PUTTING UP THE STOVE 

Here is a familiar picture which will be equally enjoyed in city and country: 
" The day for putting up the stove has come. The children fly around with 
expectation, and are somewhat in the way during the undertaking. The pipes 
are brought out and emptied and thumped clear of soot and dust. The house- 
wife goes over all the surfaces with blackening polish, making the homely dark a 
handsome black, and then the work of carrying the stove into the sitting-room 
commences. There are not enough hands. There never are. We have put up 
stoves a dozen times and never had help enough. Stoves are so unwieldly and 
they feel so heavy when you set them down on your instep. Father, with his 
lower lip clinched on his teeth, lifts and pulls the stove, and gets fast in the door- 
way. Mother and the serving-maid come to the rescue, but pull the stove the 
wrong way, and get an invocation upon their carelessness. ' Don't you see what 
you are doing? Pull it back the other way! Ouch! Just look at the back of 
my hand, black and blue from this scrouging. There ! you have set that right leg 
of it on my sore toe ! My side is stove in ! ' But with an altogether lift the heavy, 
burden reaches the middle of the room. 

A DOMESTIC PUZZLE 

" Now begins the work of finding one of the lost legs. One of them is 
gone. There is always one of them gone. The sheds are ransacked to no avail, 
and two bricks are temporarily substituted. Then the pipe is to be joined and 
set up. This requires more conscientious and determined consistency of 
behavior than any other part. A man who will keep correctness of speech in 
all the rest of the process needs some toning up here. You make up your mind 
as to where the joints and pieces belong, and insist on their taking their places, 
but how to insert the larger in the smaller is a conundrum ; yet with hammer 
you pound, and bang, and twist until you have four stubborn pieces annexed, 
and have them hoisted. 

" You rise on the top of a chair to make the last conjunction; you handle the 
whole affair with the utmost skilfulness ; you have your wife holding the pipe at 
the bottom, and the daughter holding it at the middle, when, without the slightest 
premonition, one of the lower joints backs out of its place, and down all comes 
in one grand crash, the wife struck by the falling pieces, the daughter frightened 
lest she may somehow have been the cause of the mishap, yourself running your 
sooty hand across your brow to wipe off the perspiration, leaving you, in stage- 
struck position, black as Othello." 

Here is a description of an experience whiGh will vividly recall what many 
have undergone in country places: 



440 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

CHILLS AND FEVER. VINDICATED 

" You begin without any apparent reason to feel very tired, awfully tired. 
You become seriously aware that you have a great many bones, and are con- 
vinced that your limbs have a great superfluity of ossification. You begin to 
yawn till any chicken with the gapes would think you were caricaturing the dis- 
ease of the barn-yard. You stretch, without any seeming idea as to what you 
are putting out your hands for. You button up one button of your coat. You 
walk around the house, and then fasten two buttons. You walk up stairs, and 
fasten all the buttons. You lie down on the clean white spread, boots and all. 
Your wife, after criticizing your taste in going to bed with boots on, puts on you 
all the blankets she can find; and you shout, ' More cover!' She hunts up all 
the shawls, and piles them up in woolen pyramid. She gets out two or three 
old dresses, and puts them on ; and you cry, ' Give us more cover ! ' Consider- 
ably frightened, she lays on the top of the pile her best dresses. She puts on 
the top of this the children's clothes, and then gives solidity to the mass by 
adding two pillows; and through your chattering teeth you exclaim, 'More 
cover!' You feel that you are making the Arctic expedition in search of John 
Franklin, and that the friendly Esquimaux are rubbing you down with a couple 
of small icebergs. Your tongue is a hailstone, and your nose an icicle. 

' By this time the stomach becomes like the Stock Exchange, witli all the 
breakfasts you ever ate trying each to bid the highest, after a while throwing 
all the securities flat on the market. You save a thousand dollars by getting 
seasick, without the experiences and perils of an ocean expedition. You feel as 
if you must have swallowed something that was going toward Tarshish, when 
it ought to have been going toward Nineveh. You wonder what has got into 
you; and make up your mind that it must be more Esquimaux riding up and 
down behind ten dogs fastened to sledges. 

" Suddenly the climate changes from Arctic to Torrid. Your wife lifts the 
two pillows ; but still you are too hot, and your wife takes off the layer of chil- 
dren's clothes ; but by this time you are like a buried Titan, and away fly off from 
your struggling limbs the tertiary, cretaceous, carboniferous and calciferous strata 
of old dresses and new dresses, shawls and blankets. You wonder why a big 
blanket is called a ' comfortable.' You want air. You want fans. You have 
an oven in your head, three cooking-stoves under your diaphragm ; and if one 
earns bread by the sweat of his brow, you have shed enough perspiration to buy 
out several bakeries. You chew ice, and squeeze lemons, and dramatize the ague ; 
and then lie four hours in silence, meditating on the pleasure of life in the 
country, with fine river-prospect. 

" One of the grand moral arguments in favor of the ague is the fact that 
it clothes one with the exquisite grace of humility. Nothing like the shakes to 
make a man abhor himself. He would be willing to sell himself for a low 
price, and take his pay in parsley and onions. He sinks in his own estimation, 
till in the comparison he considers the mouse to be a very noble animal, and 



TALMAGE'S WIT AND HUMOR 



441 



sits down on the porch, not wanting to be spoken to, and hurls a brick at the 
cat for making fun of him. Another thing in favor of this institution is that 
when you have it you are insured for the time being against any disease. We 
should like to see a man try to get the croup or the mumps at the time this 
is on him. It monopolizes a man's entire attention. He has no time for any- 
thing els?" 




442 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 




DR. TALMAGE S FAVORITE PORTRAIT 
This is Engraved from the Fine Photograph Taken Six Years Before His Death 



A CLUSTER. OF GEMS 

VOICES OE NATURE — THE SPIRIT OE THE FLOWERS — RECOGNITION IN HEAVEN— 

THE BEEES OE MOSCOW CHARIOTS OE CLOUD COMPENSATION IN HEAVEN — 

THE CONSUMMATION THE GLORIES OE YELLOWSTONE OUR NATIONAL 

RESOURCES — THE FINAL HAVEN — CHARACTERISTIC UTTERANCES 



IfrfQxJ ■^■AT a grand thought that the lightnings, and the tempests, and the hail, 
\^M> anc ^ ^ ie f rosts ' which are the enemies of unrighteousness, are all mar- 
\mj&' ' sna ^ ec ^ as tne Christian's bodyguard. They fight for him. They strike 
\f«r* \v\th. an arm °^ ^ re ' or cmtcn w ^ tn their fingers of ice. Everlasting 
If peace is declared between the fiercest elements of nature and the 

good man. They may in their fury seem to be indiscriminate, "smit- 
ing down the righteous with the wicked, yet they cannot damage the Christian's 
soul, although they may shrivel his body. The wintry blast that howls about 
your dwelling, you may call your brother, and the south wind coming up on a 
June day by way of a flow r er-garden, you may call your sister. Though so mighty 
in circumference and diameter, the sun and the moon have a special charge con- 
cerning you. 'The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.' Ele- 
ments and forces hidden in the earth are now harnessed and at work in produc- 
ing for you food and clothing. Some grain-field that you never saw presented 
you this day with your morning meal. The great earth and the heavens are 
the busy loom at work for you ; and shooting light, and silvery stream, and 
sharp lightning are only woven threads in the great loom, with God's foot on 
the shuttle. The same Spirit that converted your soul has also converted the 
elements from enmity toward you into inviolable friendship, and furthest star 
and deepest cavern, regions of everlasting cold as well as climes of eternal sum- 
mer, all have a mission of good, direct or indirect, for your spirit. 

THE SPIRIT OF THE FLOWERS 

" You say these flowers will fade. Yes, but perhaps we may see them again. 
They may be immortal. The fragrance of the flower may be the spirit of the 
flower; the body of the flower dying on earth, its spirit may appear in better 
worlds. I do not say it will be so. I say it may be so. The ancestors of these 

443 



444 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

tuberoses and camelias and japonicas and jasmine and heliotropes were born in 
Paradise. These apostles of beauty came down in the regular line of apostolic 
succession. Their ancestors, during the flood under ground, afterward appeared. 

" Strew the casket with flowers, the hearse with flowers, the grave with 
flowers. Put them on the brow — it will suggest coronation ; in their hand, it 
will mean victory. Christ was buried in a garden. Flowers mean resurrection. 
Death is sad enough anyhow. Let conservatory and arboreum contribute to its 
alleviation. The harebell will ring the victory. The passion-flower will express 
the sympathy. The daffodil will kindle its lamp and illumine the darkness. The 
cluster of asters will be the constellation. Your little child loved flowers when 
she was living. Put them in her hand, now that she can go forth no more and 
pluck them for himself. On sunshiny days take a fresh garland and put it over 
the still heart. 

" The world started with Eden, it will end with Eden. Heaven is called a 
Paradise of God. Paradise means flowers. While theological geniuses in this 
day are trying to blot out everything material from their idea of heaven, and. 
so far as I can tell, their future state is to be a floating around somewhere near 
the Great Bear, I should not be surprised if at last I can pick up a daisy on the 
everlasting hills and hear it say, ' I am one of the glorified flowers of earth. 
Do you not remember me ? I worshiped with you one Easter morning on earth.* 

RECOGNITION IN HEAVEN 

" How different it is on earth from the way it is in heaven when a Chris- 
tian dies ! We say, ' Close his eyes.' In heaven they say, ' Give him a palm.' 
On earth we say, ' Let him down in the ground.' In heaven they say, ' Hoist 
him on a throne.' On earth it is, ' Farewell, farewell.' In heaven it is, ' Wel- 
come, welcome.' And so I see a Christian soul coming down to the river of 
death, and he steps into the river, and the water comes to the ankle. He says, 
' Lord Jesus, is this death ? ' ' No,' says Christ, ' this is not death.' And he 
wades still deeper down into the waters until the flood comes to the knee, and he 
says, 'Lord Jesus, tell me, tell me, is this death?' and Christ says, ' No, no, this 
is not death.' And he wades still further down until the wave comes to the 
girdle, and the soul says, 'Lord Jesus, is this death?' 'No.' says Christ, 'this 
is not.' And deeper in wades the soul till the billow strikes the lip, and the 
departing one cries, 'Lord Jesus, is this death?' 'No,' says Christ, 'this is 
not.' But when Christ has lifted this soul upon a throne of glory, and the pomp 
and joy of heaven come surging to his feet, then Christ says, ' This ! oh, trans- 
ported soul ! This is death ! " 

THE BELLS OF MOSCOW 

" Last summer I saw Moscow, in some respects the most splendid city under 
the sun. After examining nine hundred brass cannons which were picked out 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 445 

of the snow after Napoleon retreated from Moscow, each cannon deep cut with 
the letter ' N,' I ascended a tower of some two hundred and fifty feet, just before 
sunset, and on each platform there were bells, large and small, and I climbed 
up among the bells, and then as I reached the top, all the bells underneath me 
began to ring, and they were joined by the bells of fourteen hundred towers 
and domes and turrets. Some of the bells sent out a faint tinkle of sound, a 
sweet tintinnabulation that seemed a bubbling of the air, and others thundered 
forth boom after boom, boom after boom, until it seemed to shake the earth and 
fill the heavens — sounds so weird, so sweet, so awful, so grand, so charming, 
so tremendous, so soft, so rippling, so reverberating — and they seemed to wreathe 
and whirl and rise and sink and burst and roll and mount and die. When 
Napoleon saw Moscow burn, it could not have been more brilliant than when I 
saw the fourteen hundred turrets aflame with the sunset; and there were roofs 
of gold, and walls of malachite, and pillars of porphyry, and balustrades of mosaic, 
and architecture of all colors mingling the brown of autumnal forests and the 
blue of summer heavens, and the conflagration of morning skies, and the emerald 
of rich grass, and the foam of tossing seas. The mingling of so many sounds 
was an entrancement almost too much for human nerves and human ears. I 
expect to see nothing to equal it until you and I see heaven." 

CHARIOTS OF CLOUD 

" Although all unworthy of such companionship, we want to come with 
him on that day to see the last of this old world which was once our residence. 
Coming through the skies, myriads of chariots rolling on and rolling down. 
By that time how changed the world will be ! Its deserts all flowers, its rocks 
all mossed and lichened, its poorhouses all palaces, its sorrows all joys, its sins 
all virtues ; and in the same pasture-field, lion and calf ; and on the same perch, 
hawk and dove. Now the chariots of cloud strike the earth, filling all the valleys 
and covering all the mountain-sides, and halting in all the cemeteries and grave- 
yards, and over the waters deep, where the dead sleep in coral sarcophagus. A 
loud blast of the Resurrection trumpet is given and the bodies of the dead 
rise and join the spirits from which they have long been separated. Then Christ 
our king, rising in the centre chariot of cloud, with his scarred hands waves 
the signal, and the chariots wheel and come into line for glorious ascent. Drive 
on ! Drive up ! Chariots of cloud ahead of the king, chariots of cloud on either 
side of the king, chariots of cloud following the king. Upward and a-past starrv 
hosts, and through immensities, and across infinitudes. Lift up your heads, ye 
Everlasting Gates ! For him who maketh the clouds his chariot, and who, 
through condescending and uplifting grace, invites us to ride with him ! 

" It will not take long for God to make up to you in the next world for all 
you have suffered in this. As you enter heaven he may say, ' Give this man 
one of those towered and colonnaded palaces on that ridge of gold overlooking 



446 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

the Sea of Glass. Give this woman a home among those amaranthine blooms and 
between those fountains tossing in the everlasting sunlight. Give her a couch 
canopied with rainbows to pay her for all the fatigues of wifehood and mother- 
hood and housekeeping, from which she had no rest for forty years. Cup- 
bearers of heaven, give these newly arrived souls from earth the costliest bever- 
ages and roll to their doors the grandest chariots, and hang on their walls the 
sweetest harps that ever responded to fingers seraphic. Give to them rapture 
on rapture, celebration on celebration, jubilee on jubilee, heaven on heaven. They 
had a hard time on earth earning a livelihood, or nursing sick children, or wait- 
ing on querulous old age, or battling falsehoods that were told about them, or 
were compelled to work after they got short-breathed and rheumatic and dim- 
sighted. Chamberlains of heaven ! Keepers of the King's robes ! Banqueters 
of eternal royalty! Make up to them a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a million- 
fold for all they suffered from swaddling clothes to shroud, and let all those who, 
whether on the hills or in the temples or on the thrones or on jasper wall, were 
helped and sanctified and prepared for this heavenly realm by the Mission of 
the Frosts, stand up and wave their sceptres ! ' And I looked, and behold ! nine- 
tenths of the ransomed rose to their feet, and nine-tenths of the sceptres swayed 
to and fro in the light of the sun that never sets, and then I understood, far 
better than before, that trouble comes for beneficent puroose, and that on the 
coldest nights the aurora is brightest in the northern heavens." 

THE CONSUMMATION 

" Oh, that coming day of the world's perfection ! The earth will be so 
changed that the sermonology will be changed. There will be no more calls to 
repentance, for all will have repented. No more gathering of alms for the poor, 
for the poor will have been enriched. No hospital Sunday, for disjointed bones 
will have been set and the wounds all healed, and the incurable diseases of other 
times will have been overcome by a materia medica, and a pharmacy, and a den- 
tistry, and a therapeutics that have conquered everything that afflicted nerve, 
or lung, or tooth, or eye, or limb. Healthology complete and universal. The 
poultice, and the ointment, and the panacea, and the catholicon, and the surgeon's 
knife, and the dentist's forceps, and the scientist's X-ray will have fulfilled their 
mission. The social life of the world will be perfected. In that millennial age, 
I imagine ourselves standing in front of a house lighted for levee. We enter 
among groups filled with gladness, and talking good sense, and rallying each 
other in pleasantries, and in everv possible wav forwarding good neighborhood. 
No looking askance; no whispered backbiting; no strut of pretention; no oblivion 
of some one's presence because you do not want to know him. Each one happy, 
determined on making some one else happy. Words of honest appreciation 
instead of hollow flattery. Suavities and genialities, instead of inflations and 
pomposities. Equipage and upholstery and sculpture and painting paid for. 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 447 

Two hours of mental and moral improvement. All the guests able to walk 
as steadily down the steps of that mansion as when they ascended them. No 
awakening the next morning with aching head and bloodshot eye, and incom- 
petent for the day's duties. The social life as perfect as refinement and common 
sense, and culture, and prosperity, and religion can make it. The earth made 
better than it was at the start, and all through Gospelizing influences directly or 
indirectly. 

THE GLORIES OF THE YELLOWSTONE PARK 

" Gothic arches, Corinthian capitals and Egyptian basilicas built before 
human architecture was born. Huge fortifications of granite constructed before 
war forged its first cannon. Gibraltars and Sebastopols that never can be taken. 
Alhambras, where kings of strength and queens- of beauty reigned long before 
the first earthly crown was empearled. Thrones on which no one but the King 
of heaven and earth ever sat. Fount of waters at which the hills are baptized, 
while the giant cliffs stand 'round as sponsors. For thousands of years before 
that scene was unveiled to human sight, the elements were busy, and the geysers 
were hewing away with their hot chisel, and glaciers were pounding with their 
cold hammers, and hurricanes were cleaving with their lightning strokes, and 
hailstones giving the finishing touches, and after all these forces of nature had 
done their best, in our century the curtain dropped, and the world had a new 
and divinely inspired revelation, the Old Testament written on papyrus, the New 
Testament written on parchment, and now this last Testament written on the 
rocks." 

OUR. NATIONAL RESOURCES 

" We have a better climate than in any other nation. We do not suffer 
from anything like the Scotch mist, or the English fogs, or from anything like 
the Russian ice blast, or from the awful typhus of Southern Europe, or the Asiatic 
cholera. Epidemics here are exceptional, very exceptional. Plenty of wood 
and coal to make a roaring fire in winter time ; easy access to sea beach or moun- 
tain top when the ardors of summer come down ; Michigan wheat for the bread ; 
Long Island corn for the meal ; New Jersey pumpkins for the pies ; Carolina 
rice for the queen of puddings ; prairie fowl from Illinois ; fish from the Hud- 
son and the James ; hickory, and hazel, and walnuts from all our woods ; Louis- 
iana sugar to sweeten our beverages ; Georgia cotton to keep us warm ; oats for 
the horses ; carrots for the cattle ; and oleomargarine butter for the hogs ! In 
our land all products and all climates that you may desire. Are your nerves 
weak and in need of bracing up? Go North. Is your throat delicate and in 
need of balmy airs? Go South. Do you feel crowded and want more room? 
Go West. Are you tempted to become office-seekers ? Go to jail! Almost any- 
thing you want you can have. Plenty to eat, plenty to wear, plenty to read. 

" The voyage from this world to the next we must all take, landsmen as 
well as seafarers. Let us be sure that we have the right pilot, and the right 



448 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

chart, and the right captain, and that we start in the right direction. It will 
be to each of us who love the Lord a voyage more wonderful for discovery than 
that which Columbus took, for, after all we have heard about that other world, 
wc know not where it is, or how it looks ; and it will be as new as San Salvador 
was to the glorious captain of the Santa Maria. ' Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of man.' May the light from that 
Golden Beach flash on the darkness, and we be able to step ashore amid groves 
and orchards and aromas, such as the world's atmosphere never ripened or 
breathed. Ay, fellow-mariners, over the rough sea of life, through the fogs and 
mists of earth, see you not already the outline of the better country? Land 
ahead! Land ahead! Nearer and nearer we come to the heavenly wharfage. 
Throw out the planks and step ashore into the arms of your kindred, who have 
been waiting and watching for the hour of your disembarkation. Through the 
rich grace of Christ, our Lord, may we all have such blissful arrival ! 



CHARACTERISTIC UTTERANCES 

" What we want in the work of walling back the oceans of poverty and 
drunkenness and impurity and sin is the help of more womanly and manly hands. 
Oh, how the tides come in! Atlantic surge of sorrow after Atlantic surge of 
sorrow, and the tempests of human hate and Satanic fury are in full cry." 

" He who hunts for amusement and makes that his business, is like a man 
who hunts for a lost diamond among rocks, not regarding a precipice near by, 
and in the joy of finding the diamond, stumbles five hundred feet ofT and down, 
only the cormorants and the sea-gulls knowing where he perished." 

" A chemist will tell you that a tear is made up of salt and lime and other 
component parts, but he misses the chief ingredients — the acid of a soured life, 
the viperous sting of a bitter memory, the fragments of a broken heart. I will 
tell you what a tear is : It is agony in solution." 

" I would rather be the means of soothing one perturbed spirit than to play 
a tune that would set all the sons of mirth reeling in the dance." 

" Monuments have been raised over poets and philanthropists. Would that 
some tall shaft might be erected in honor of the world's buried books! The 
world's authors would make pilgrimage thereto, and poetry and literature and 
science and religion would consecrate it with their tears." 

" Cruelty grows more rapidly than any other plant. L T proot it : expel it 
from your heart by an all-pervading sympathy. If you feel any satisfaction in 
your soul at the pain of others, at the misfortunes of others, at the downfall of 
others — beware ! " 

" I tell you, the home is a mighty test of character. What you are at home 
you are everywhere, whether you demonstrate it or not." 



A CLUSTER OE GEMS 449 

WELCOME TO HEAVEN 

" Heaven is not a stately, formal place, as I sometimes hear it described, a 
very frigidity of splendor, where people stand on cold formalities and go around 
about with heavy crowns of gold on their heads. No, that is not my idea of 
heaven. My idea of heaven is, you are seated in the evening-tide by the fire- 
place, your whole family there, or nearly all of them there. While you are seated 
talking and enjoying the evening hour, there is a knock at the door and the door 
opens, and there comes in a brother who has been long absent. He has been lost ; 
for years you have not seen him, and no sooner do you make up your mind that 
it is certainly he than you leap up, and the question is who shall give him the first 
embrace. That is my idea of heaven — a great home circle where they are waiting 
for us. Oh, will you not know your mother's voice there? She who always 
called you by your first name long after others had given you the formal ' Mis- 
ter ' ? You were never anything but James or John, or George, or Mary, or 
Florence to her. Will you not know your child's voice? She of the bright eye, 
and the ruddy cheek, and the quick step, who came in from play and flung 
herself into your lap, a very shower of mirth and beauty? Why, the picture is 
worn too deep into your soul. It cannot wear out. If that little one should stand 
on the other side of some heavenly hill and call to you, you would hear her voice 
above the burst of heaven's great orchestra. Know it ! You could not help but 
know it. 

" Now I bring you this glorious consolation of future recognition. If you 
could get this theory into your heart it would lift a great many shadows that are 
stretching across it. When I was a lad I used to go out to the railroad and put 
my ear down on the track, and I could hear the express train rumbling miles 
away, and coming on; and to-day, my friends, if we only had faith enough we 
could put our ear down to the grave of our dead, and listen and hear in the dis- 
tance the rumbling on of the chariots of resurrection victory. O heaven ! sweet 
heaven ! You do not spell heaven as you used to spell it. You used to spell it 
h-e-a-v-e-n, heaven. But now when you want to spell that word you place 
side by side the faces of the loved ones who are gone, and in that irradiation of 
light and love, and beauty and joy, you spell it out as never before, in songs and 
hallelujahs. Oh, ye whose hearts are down under the sod of the cemetery, cheer 
up at the thought of this reunion ! How much you will have to tell them when 
once you meet them! How much you have been through since you saw them 
last ! On the shining shore you will talk it all over. The heartaches. The lone- 
liness. The sleepless nights. The weeping until you had no more power to 
weep, because the heart was withered and dried up. Story of vacant chair, and 
empty cradle, and little shoe only half worn out never to be worn again, just the 
shape of the foot that once pressed it. And dreams when you thought that the, 
departed had come back again, and the room seemed bright with their faces, 
and you started up to greet them, and in the effort the dream broke and you 
29 



450 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIEE AND WORK 

found yourself standing amid-room in the midnight — alone ! Talking it all over, 
and then, hand in hand, walking up and down in the light. No sorrow, no tears, 
no death. Oh, heaven! beautiful heaven! Heaven where our friends are. 
Heaven where we expect to be. In the East they take a cage of birds and bring 
it to the tomb of the dead, and then they open the door of the cage, and the birds, 
flying out, sing. And I would to-day bring a cage of Christian consolations to 
the grave of your loved ones, and I would open the door and let them fill all the 
air with the music of their voices. 

" Oh, how they bound in, these spirits before the throne ! Some shout with 
gladness. Some break forth into uncontrollable weeping for joy. Some stand 
speechless in their shock of delight. They sing. They quiver with excessive 
gladness. They gaze on the temples, on the palaces, on the waters, on each 
other. They weave their joy into garlands, they spring it into triumphal arches, 
they strike it on timbrels, and then all the loved ones gather in a great circle 
around the throne of God— fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daugh- 
ters, lovers and friends, hand to hand around about the throne of God — the circle 
ever widening — joy to joy, jubilee to jubilee, victory to victory, ' until the day 
breaks and the shadows flee away. Turn my beloved, and be thou like a roe or 
a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.' 

HEAVENLY VESPERS] 

" But hark ! the bell of the cathedral rings — the cathedral bell of heaven. 
What is the matter? There is going to be a great meeting in the temple. Wor- 
shipers all coming through the aisles. Make room for the Conqueror. Christ 
standing in the temple. All heaven gathering around him. Those who loved 
the beautiful, come to look at the Rose of Sharon. Those who loved music, 
come to listen to his voice. Those who were mathematicians, come to count 
the years of his reign. Those who were explorers, come to discover the breadth 
of his love. Those who had the military spirit on earth sanctified, and the mili- 
tary spirit in heaven, come to look at the Captain of their salvation. The astron- 
omers come to look at the Morning Star. The men of the law come to look at 
him who is the judge of quick and dead. The men who healed the sick, come to 
rook at him who was wounded for our transgressions. All different, and different 
forever in many respects, yet all alike in admiration for Christ, in worship of 
Christ, and all alike in joining in the doxology: ' Unto him who washed us from 
our sins in his own blood, and made us kings and priests unto God, to him be 
glory in the church throughout all ages, world without end ! ' Amen. 

CELESTIAL MUSIC 

" Our departed Christian friends who in this world were passionately fond 
of music are still regaling that taste in the world celestial. The Bible says so 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 451 

much about the music of heaven that it cannot all be figurative. The Bible over 
and over again speaks of the songs of heaven. If heaven had no songs of its 
own, a vast number of those of earth would have been taken up by the earthly 
emigrants. Surely the Christian at death does not lose his memory. Then there 
must be millions of souls in heaven who know 'Coronation,' and ' Antioch,' and 
' Mount Pisgah,' and ' Old Hundred.' The leader of the eternal orchestra need 
only once tap his baton, and all heaven will be ready for the hallelujah. If 
heaven should ever get out of music, Thomas Hastings and Lowell Mason and 
Bradbury would start up a hundred old magnificent chorals. But what with 
the new song that John mentions, and the various doxologies alluded to, and the 
importation of sublimer harmonies, a Christian fond of music, dying, will have 
an abundance of regalement. What though the voice be gone in death, what 
though the ear be fallen in dissolution, are you therefore to conclude that the 
spirit will have no power to make or catch sweet sounds ? Cannot the soul sing ? 
How often we compliment some exquisite singer by saying : ' There was so 
much soul in her music.' In heaven it will be all soul, until the body after a 
while comes up in the resurrection, and then there will be an additional heaven. 
Cannot the soul hear? If it can hear, then it can hear music. Do not, therefore, 
let it be in your household, when some member leaves for heaven, as it is in some 
households, that you close the piano and unstring the harp for two years, because 
the fingers that used to play on them are still. You must remember that they 
have better instruments of music where they are. You ask me, ' Do they have 
real harps, and real trumpets, and real organs ? ' I do not know. Some wise- 
acres say positively there are no such things in heaven. I do not know, but I 
should not be surprised if the God who made all the mountains, and all the hills, 
and all the forests, and all the metals of the earth, and all the growths of the uni- 
verse — I should not be surprised if he could, if he had a mind to, make a few 
harps and trumpets and organs. 

" Grand old Haydn, sick and worn out, was carried for the last time into 
the music hall, and there he heard his own oratorio of the ' Creation.' History 
says that as the orchestra came to that famous passage, ' Let there be light ! ' the 
whole audience rose and cheered, and Haydn waved his hand toward heaven, and 
said : ' It comes from here.' Overwhelmed with his own music, he was carried 
out in his chair, and as he came to the door he spread his hand toward the 
orchestra as in benediction. Haydn was right when he waved his hand toward 
heaven and said, ' It comes from there.' Music was born in heaven, and it will 
ever have its highest throne in heaven; and I want you to understand that our 
departed friends who were passionately fond of music here are now at the head- 
quarters of harmony. I think that the grand old tunes that died when your 
grandfathers died, have gone with them to heaven. When those tunes died, 
they did not stay on earth, and they could not have been banished to perdition, 
and so I think they must be in the corridors of alabaster and Lebanon cedar. 






452 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

THE KINGS HIGHWAY 

" I start on the King's highway, and I go a little distance, and I find a harper, 
and I say, ' Who art thou, O harper ? Hast thou not a tune for the tired pil- 
grim?' He makes no answer. He turns his face toward heaven, and his fingers 
tremble among the strings of the harp, and he begins the song: ' The Lord is my 
light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my 
life; of whom shall I be afraid?' I go a little further on this King's highway, 
and I accost a trumpeter, and I say, ' Who art thou, O trumpeter? And hast 
thou not a song for the tired pilgrim ? ' He says nothing ; but he puts the trumpet 
to his mouth, and he begins to discourse : ' They shall hunger no more, neither 
thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb 
which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water, 
and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.' And I go a little further on 
this King's highway, and I meet a maiden of Israel. She has neither harp nor 
trumpet, but she has cymbals, and I say, 'Who art thou, O maiden of Israel?' 
She makes no answer ; but I notice that the cymbals are rusty with the rust of 
the sea-spray, and I find it is Miriam, as she claps the cymbals, discoursing: 
' Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously ; the horse and the rider 
hath he thrown into the sea.' Then I go a little further on the King's highway, 
and I see a group, white-robed, approaching me ; and they are so bright, so 
lustrous, so fair, I say: 'Who are ye?' And an angelic voice comes from 
heaven, saying, ' These are they who came out of great tribulation, and had their 
robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.' " 

THE FINAL CONSUMMATION 

" There is coming a day of trial, in which not only the saint, but the sinner 
must appear. That day of trial will come very suddenly. The farmer will be at 
the plow, the merchant will be in the counting-room, the woodman will be ring- 
ing his ax on the hickories, the weaver will have his foot on the treadle, the 
manufacturer will be walking amid the buzz of looms, and the clack of flying 
machinery, the counsel may be standing at the bar pleading the law, the minister 
may be in the pulpit pleading the Gospel, the drunkard may be reeling amid his 
cups, and the blasphemer with the oath caught between his teeth. Lo! the sun 
hides. Night comes down at mid-noon. A wave of darkness rolls over the earth. 
The stars appear at noon-day. The earth shudders and throbs. There an earth- 
quake opens and a city sinks as a crocodile would crunch a child. Mountains 
roll in their sockets and send down their granite cliffs in an avalanche of rock. 
Rivers pause in their chase for the sea and ocean, uprearing, cries to flying Alps 
and Himalaya. Beasts bellow, and moan, and snuff up the darkness. Clouds 
fly like flocks of swift eagles. Great thunders beat and boom and burst. Stars 
shoot and fall. The Almighty, rising on his throne, declares that time shall be no 
longer, and the archangel's trump repeats it till all the living hear, and the con- 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 453 

tinents of dead spring to their feet, crying, * Time shall be no longer ! ' Oh, on 
that day, will you be ready ? " 

THE DIVINE FACE 

" Do you want to have Christ's celestial beauty? Paul tells you how you 
may attain it : ' With unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, 
we are transformed into the same image.' What a sympathetic face it must have 
been to encourage the sick woman who was beyond any help from the doctors, 
to touch the hem of his garment! What a suffering face it must have been 
when suspended on the perpendicular and horizontal pieces of the wood of 
martyrdom, and his antagonists slapped the pallid cheek with their rough 
hands, and befouled it with the saliva of their blasphemous lips ! What a trem- 
endous face it must have been to lead St. John to describe it in the coming- 
Judgment as scattering the universe when he says : ' From whose face 
the earth and the heaven fled away.' Oh, Christ ! Once the Naza- 
rene, but now the Celestial! Once of Cross, but now of Throne! Once 
crowned with stinging bramble, but now coroneted with the jewels of ran- 
somed empires ! Turn on us thy pardoning face and forgive us ; thy sym- 
pathetic face and console us ; thy suffering face and have thy atonement avail 
for us ; thy omnipotent face and rescue us. Oh, what a face ! So scarred, so 
lacerated, so resplendent, so overwhelmingly glorious that the seraphim put 
wing to wing, and with their conjoined pinions keep off some of the lustre that 
is too mighty even for eyes cherubic or archangelic ; and yet this morning- 
turning- upon us with a sheathed splendor like that with which he appeared 
when he said to the mothers, bashful about presenting their children : ' Suffer 
them to come;' and to the poor waif of the street: ' Neither do T condemn thee;' 
and to the eyes of the blind beggar of the wayside : ' Be opened.' " 

NEARING THE HAVEN 

" There is near Bombay a tree that they call the ' sorrowing tree,'' the pecu- 
liarity of which is it never puts forth any bloom in the daytime, but in the night 
puts out all its bloom and all its redolence. And I have to tell you that though 
Christian character puts forth its swetest blossoms in the darkness of sickness, 
the darkness of financial distress, the darkness of bereavement, the darkness of 
death, ' Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.' 
Across the harsh discords of this world rolls the music of the skies — music that 
breaks from the lips, music that breaks from the harps and rustles from the 
palms, music like falling water over rocks, music like wandering winds among 
leaves, music like caroling birds among forests, music like ocean billows storm- 
ing the Atlantic beach: 'They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, 
neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat; for the Lamb which is in the 
midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water, and God shall 
wipe away all tears from their eyes.' I see a great Christian fleet approaching 



454 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

that harbor. Some of the ships come in with sails rent and bulwarks knocked 
away, but still afloat. Nearer and nearer the shining shore. Nearer and 
nearer eternal anchorage. Haul away, my lads ! haul away ! Some of the ships 
had mighty tonnage, and others were shallops easily lifted of the wave. Some 
were men-of-war and armed with the thunders of Christian battle, and others 
were unpretending tugs taking others through the ' Narrows,' and some were 
coasters that never ventured out into the deep seas of Christian experience : 
but they are all coming nearer the wharf — brigantine, galleon, iine-of-battle 
ship, long-boat, pinnace, war-frigate — and as they come into the harbor I find 
that they are driven by the long, loud, terrific blast of the east wind. It is 
through much tribulation that you are to enter into the kingdom of God." 

THE BRIDE'S JOURNEY HOME 

"Jesus comes in the last extremity at the river of death. Jesus will come 
to us, and as we say, ' Lord Jesus, I am afraid of that water ; I cannot wade 
through to the other side,' he will say, ' Take hold of my arm ; ' and we will take 
hold of his arm, and then he will put his foot in the surf of the wave, taking 
us on down deeper, deeper, deeper, and our soul will cry, ' All thy waves and 
billows have gone over me.' They cover the feet, come to the knee, pass the 
girdle, and come to the head, and our soul cries out, ' Lord Jesus Christ, I can- 
not hold thine arm any longer! ' Then Jesus will turn around, throw both his 
arms about us, and set us on the beach, far beyond the tossing of the billow. 
Jesus in the last extremity! You know the Bible says that the church is the 
Lamb's wife ; and the Lord will after awhile come to fetch her home. There 
will be gleaming of torches in the sky, and the trumpets of God will ravish the 
air with their music ; and Jesus will stretch out his hand, and the church, robed 
in white, will put aside her veil, and look up into the face of her Lord the king, 
and the bridegroom will say to the bride,' Thou hast been faithful through all 
these years ! The mansion is ready ! Come home ! Thou art fair, my love ! ' 
and then he shall put upon her brow the crown of dominion, and the table will 
be spread, and it will reach across the skies, and the mighty ones of heaven 
will come in, garlanded with beauty and striking their cymbals ; and the bride- 
groom and bride will stand at the head of the table, and the banqueters, looking 
up, will wonder and admire, and say, ' That is Jesus, the bridegroom ! But the 
scar on his brow is covered with the coronet, and the stab in his side is covered 
with a robe ! ' and ' That is the bride ! the weariness of her earthly woe lost 
in the flush of this wedding triumph ! ' There will be wine enough at that 
wedding; not coming up from the poisoned vats of earth, but the vineyards of 
God will contribute their ripest clusters, and the cups and the tankards will 
blush to the brim with the heavenly vintage, and then all the banqueters will 
drink standing. Esther, having come up from the Bacchanalian revelry of 
Ahasuerus, where his many lords feasted, will be there. And the Queen of 
Sheba, from the banquet of Solomon, will be there. And the mother of Jesus, 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 455 

from the wedding in Cana, will be there. And they all will agree that the 
earthly feasting was poor compared with that. Then, lifting tiieir chalices in 
that holy light, they shall cry to the Lord of the feast/ Thou hast kept the good 
wine until now ! ' " 

CLING TO THE OLD BIBLE 

" Cling to your Bible. Be ready to take part in this great battle against 
infidelity. There are so many now warring against Christianity, and warring 
with as little sense as did Thomas Paine, who declared that at the very time he 
was writing his infidel books he had not a Bible in the house, and had not seen 
a Bible for years. Young men — especially I say it to young men, for I know 
what you have to go through with in the way of caricature and scoffing in regard 
to Christianity — do not be ashamed to say you believe the Bible from the first 
word of the first verse of the first chapter of the book of Genesis to the last 
word of the last verse of the last chapter of the Book of Revelation. I do. Do 
you? God help you to believe a whole Bible. If one part goes, it will all go. 
Oh ! the meanness of a man who would try to take our Bible from us. There 
is a ship in trouble on the sea. The captain and the crew are at their wits* 
end. You are an old sailor, and come up and say to the captain, ' Excuse me ; 
I can give you some advice that I think will be helpful.' The advice is given, 
the advice is taken and the ship in a few hours is out of all trouble. You did 
well. Thank you, in the name of humanity. You did well in giving counsel 
and helping the ship and the crew. But suppose at the very time the storm was 
the worst, and the excitement was the greatest, and the anxiety of the captain 
and the crew was beyond all bounds — suppose you should go and pick up the 
compass and pitch it over the taffrail? Magnificent thing that would be for 
you to do, would it not ? Why, that seems so dastardly mean there is nothing 
meaner. Now I say, if you have any better compass, give it to us. 

" I have for twenty-five years been willing to give up my Bible as soon as 
you can give me a better one — something that is of more solace to my soul, 
something that can throw more light upon the gate of the future. I am ready 
to surrender it now, if you can give me a better one. Propose to throw that 
compass overboard, do you? I have more love for the fangs of a rattlesnake 
than I have for a man who would sting to death the last hope of our race, sub- 
stituting nothing, proposing nothing. But I can think of something meaner 
than that. There is an aged man on the mountain, and the night has overtaken 
him. He has a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other, and he is feeling 
his way along. You are in a mountain cabin, and you see him coming along. 
You go out to help him. You say, ' I will take that staff away, and that lantern, 
and I will give you something better. Here is my arm, father. You seem to 
be lost, and far away from home. I will take care of you. Lean on my arm. 
I will see you through.' You do well. Thank you. You do grandly. Thank 
you. But suppose you come out of your cabin and say to the man with the 



456 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

staff in one hand and a lantern in the other, ' Here, let me have that staff,' and 
you snap it on your knee, and you throw it down the rocks ; and then you say, 
' Let me have that lantern,' and you blow the light out and leave him on the 
mountain to perish! That is magnificent, is it not That is what infidelity 
proposes to do. It says, ' Give me that staff, old man; give me that light: I 
will break the one and I will blow out the other.' " 

FUNERAL OF THE FLOWERS 

" The summer is ended, and we shall soon all be invited to attend the 
Funeral of the Flowers. It was on a long slope which at one side dipped into 
the warm valleys, and on the other side arose very high into the frosty air, so 
that on one boundary line lived cactus and orange-blossom and camellia, and on 
the other resided balsam-pine and Alpine strawberry, and all kinds of growths 
between, that the Funeral of the Flowers occurred. 

" Living midway that steep slope of land there was a rose, that in common 
parlance we called ' Giant of Battle.' It was red and fiery, looking as if it had 
stood on fields of carnage where the blood dashed to the lip. It was a hero 
among flowers. Many of the grasses of the field worshiped it as a god, the 
mignonette burning incense beneath it, the marigold throwing glittering rays 
of beauty before it, the mistletoe crawling at its feet. The fame of this Giant 
of Battle was world-wide, and some said that its ancestors on the father's side 
had stood on the plains of Waterloo, and on its mother's side at Magenta, and 
drank themselves drunk on human gore. But children are not to blame for 
for what their ancestors do, and this rose, called Giant of Battle, was universally 
adored. 

" But the Giant got sick. Whether it was from the poisonous breath of 
the Nightshade that had insolently kissed him, or from grief at the loss of a 
Damask-rose that had first won his heart by her blushes, and then died, we 
know not ; but the Giant of Battle was passing rapidly away. There was great 
excitement up and down the slopes. A consultation of botanical physicans 
was called, and Doctor Eglantine came and thrust a thorn for a lancet into the 
Giant's veins, on the principle that he had too much blood and was apoplectic, 
and Doctor Balm of Gilead attempted to heal the pain by poultices ; but still the 
Giant grew worse and worse. The Primrose called in the evening to see how 
the dying hero was, and the Morning Glory stopped before breakfast to see 
if it could do any good. Every flower or grass that called had a prescription 
for him that would surely cure. Neighbor Horse-sorrel suggested acids, and 
Honeysuckle proposed sugars, and Myrrh suggested bitters, and Ladies-slipper, 
having taken off her shoes, said that all the patient wanted was more quiet about 
the room. 

" But too much changing of medicine only made the Giant more and more 
sick, and one afternoon, while sitting up in bed w r ith the cup of honeysuckle 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 457 

to his lips, and with the fan of the South wind fluttering in his face, his head 
dropped and he died. As the breath went out of him a Clematis that had been 
overlooking the sad scene, said, ' What time is it ? ' and a cluster of Four-o'clocks 
answered, 4 A little past the middle of the afternoon.' 

" The next morning the funeral bells all rang : the Blue-bells and the Can- 
terbury-bells and the Fox-glove-bells and Hare-bells and all flowerdom came to 
the obsequies of the Giant of Battle. He was laid out on a trellis, and on a 
catafalque, such as dead monarchs never had, of dahlia and phox and magnolia 
and geranium and gladiola. There was a great audience of flowers. Solemnity 
came down upon them. Even the Cock's-comb stopped strutting, and Larkspur 
ceased her fickleness, and Snap-dragon looked gentle, and Snowdrop seemed to 
melt, and Bachelor's button wished it had some one to express its grief to. The 
Passion-flower came in and threw herself on the pale cheek of the Giant with 
most ardent demonstration of affection. Amaranth and Hydrangea and Daffo- 
dil and Spiderwort and Spirea having come far through the night and dew, stood 
around with their eyes full of tears. 

" The funeral services began. Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley took 
part in them. The Star of Bethlehem sang a hymn to the tune of Bonny Doon. 
A Forget-me-not said a few words of commemoration. Then Heartsease arose 
from the work of comfort, and read the lesson of the day : 'As a flower of the 
field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the 
place thereof shall know it no more.' And all the bells, Fox-glove-bells and 
Blue-bells and Canterbury-bells and Hare-bells, prolonged the strain through 
all that day, tolling and tolling out, ' No more ! no more ! ' And thus ended the 
Funeral of the Flowers." 

THE FADING LEAF 

" For several autumns I have made a tour to the Far West, and one 
autumn, about this time, saw that which I shall never forget. I have seen the 
autumnal sketches of Cropsey and other skilful pencils, but that week I saw a 
pageant two thousand miles long. Let artists stand back when God stretches 
his canvas ! A grander spectacle was never kindled before mortal eyes. Along 
by the rivers, and up and down the sides of the great hills, and by the banks of 
the lakes, there was an indescribable mingling of gold, and orange, and crimson, 
and saffron, now sobering into drab and maroon, now flaming into solferino 
and scarlet. Here and there the trees looked as if just their tips had blossomed 
into fire. In the morning light the forests seemed as if they had been trans- 
figured, and in the evening hour they looked as if the sunset had burst and 
dropped upon the leaves. In more sequestered spots, where the frosts had 
been hindered in their work, we saw the first kindling of the flames of color in a 
lowly sprig; then they rushed up from branch to branch, until the glory of the 
Lord submerged the forest. Here you would find a tree just making up its 
mind to change, and there one looked as if, wounded at every pore, it stood 



458 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

bathed in carnage. Along the banks of Lake Huron there were hills over which 
there seemed pouring cataracts of fire, tossed up and down, and every whither 
by the rocks. Through some of the ravines we saw occasionally a foaming 
stream, as though it were rushing to put out the conflagration. If at one end 
of the woods a commanding tree would set up its crimson banner, the whole 
forest prepares to follow. If God's urn of colors were not infinite, one swamp 
that I saw along the Maumee would have exhausted it forever. It seemed 
as if the sea of divine glory had dashed its surf to the tip top of the Aheghanies, 
and then it had come dripping down to lowest leaf and deepest cavern. 

" Suppose you that the pictured leaf that you hold in your hand took on its 
color in an hour, or in a day, or in a week? No. Deeper and deeper the flush, 
till all the veins of its life now seem opened and bleeding away. After a while, 
leaf after leaf, they fall. Now those on the outer branches, then those most 
hidden, until the last spark of the gleaming forge shall have been quenched. 
So gradually we pass away. From day to day we hardly see the change. But 
the frosts have touched us. The work of decay is going on. Now a slight 
cold. Now a season of over-fatigue. Now a fever. Now a stitch in the side. 
Now a neuralgic thrust. Now a rheumatic twinge. Now a fall. Little by 
little. Pain by pain. Less steady of limb. Sight not so clear. Ear not so alert. 
After a while we take a staff. Then, after much resistance, we come to 
spectacles. Instead of bounding into the vehicle, we are willing to be helped 
in. At last the octogenarian falls. Forty years of decaying. No sudden 
change. No fierce cannonading of the batteries of life; but a fading away — 
slowly — gradually. As the leaf! As the leaf!'' 

INVISIBLE COHORTS 

" Oh ! departed nonagenarian ! after you have taken a good rest from your 
struggle of seventy active years, come down again into the fight and bring with 
you a host of the old Christian warriors who once mingled in the fray. In this 
battle the visible troops are not so mighty as the invisible. The Gospel campaign 
began with the supernatural — the midnight chant that woke the shepherds, the 
hushed sea, the eyesight given where the patient had been born without the optic 
nerve, the sun obliterated from the noonday heavens, the law of gravitation loosing 
its grip as Christ ascended ; and as the Gospel campaign began with the super- 
natural, it will close with the supernatural, and the winds and the waves and the 
lightnings and the earthquakes will come in on the right side and against the 
wrong side; and our ascended champions will return, whether the world sees 
them or does not see them. I do not think that those great souls departed are 
going to do nothing hereafter but sing psalms and play harps and breathe frank- 
incense and walk seas of glass mingled with fire. The mission they fulfilled 
while in the body will be eclipsed by their post-mortem mission, with faculties 
quickened and velocities multiplied; and it may have been to that our dying 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 459 

reformer referred when he said, ' I long to be free ! ' There may be bigger 
worlds than this to be redeemed, and more gigantic abominations to be over- 
thrown than this world ever saw ; and the discipline gotten there may only be 
preliminary drill for a campaign in some other world, and perhaps some other 
constellation. But the crowned heroes and heroines, because of their grander 
achievements in greater spheres will not forget this old world where they prayed 
and suffered and triumphed. Church militant and Church triumphant, but two 
divisions of the same army — right wing and left wing." 

THE WELL OF CONSOLATION 

" There is a well for every desert of bereavement. Looking over any audi- 
ence, I notice signs of mourning and woe. Have you found consolation? Oh, 
man bereft, oh, woman bereft, have you found consolation? Hearse after hearse. 
We step from one grave hillock to another grave hillock. We follow corpses, 
ourselves soon to be like them. The world is in mourning for its dead. Every 
heart has become the sepulchre of some buried joy. But sing ye to God; every 
wilderness has a well in it ; and I come to that well and I begin to draw water 
from a well that never gets dry. If you have lived in the country you have some- 
times taken hold of the rope of the old well-sweep, and you know how the 
bucket came up, dripping with bright, cool water. And I lay hold of the rope 
of God's mercy and I begin to draw on that Gospel well-sweep, and I see the 
buckets coming up. Thirsty soul ! Here is one bucket of life ! Come and drink 
of it. ' Whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely.' I 
pull away again at the rope, and another bucket comes up. It is this promise: 
1 Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.' I lay hold 
of the rope again, and pull away with all my strength, and the bucket comes up, 
bright and beautiful and cool. Here is the promise : ' Come unto me, all ye 
who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' 

" The old astrologers used to cheat the people with the idea that they could 
tell from the position of the stars what would occur in the future, and if a cluster 
of stars stood in one relation, why, that would be a prophecy of evil; if a cluster 
of stars stood in another relation, that would be a prophecy of good. What 
superstition ! But here is a new astrology in which I put all my faith. By look- 
ing up to the star of Jacob, the morning star of the Redeemer, I can make this 
prophecy in regard to those who put their trust in God : ' All things work 
together for good to those who love God.' " 

ETERNAL PROVIDENCE 

" I am no fatalist, but I should be completely wretched if I did not feel that 
all the affairs of my life are in God's hand, and all that pertains to me and mine. 
You may ask me a hundred questions I cannot answer, but I shall until the day 
of my death believe that I am under the unerring care of God ; and the heavens 



460 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

may fall and the world may burn and the judgment may thunder and eternal ages 
may roll, but not a hair shall fall from my head, not a shadow shall drop on my 
path, not a sorrow shall transfix my heart without being divinely arranged — 
arranged by a loving, sympathetic Father. He bottles our tears, he catches our 
sorrows; and to the orphan he will be a father and to the widow he will be a hus- 
band and to the outcast he will be a home and to the most miserable wretch 
who crawls up out of the ditch in his abomination crying for mercy he will be 
an all-pardoning God. The rocks shall turn gray with age and the forests shall 
be unmoored in the last hurricane, and the sun shall shut its fiery eyelid and the 
stars shall drop like blasted figs and the continents shall go down like anchors 
in the deep and the ocean shall heave its last groan and lash itself with expiring 
agony and the world shall wrap itself in winding sheets of flame and leap on the 
funeral pyre of the Judgment Day; but God's love shall not die. It will kindle 
its suns after all other lights have gone out. It will be a billowing sea after the 
last ocean has wept itself away. It will warm itself bv the fire of a consuming 
world. It will sing while the archangel's trumpet is pealing forth and the air is 
filled with the crash of broken sepulchres and the rush of the wings of the rising 
dead ! O my God, comfort me and comfort all this people with this Christian 
sentiment ! " 

CHRISTIAN HEROINES 

" What a joy it will be for the weary, tired woman, through the grace of 
Christ, finally to reach heaven. Oh, what a multitude of women, never heard 
of on earth, or known but little, have gone into the rest and peace of heaven. 
What a rest! What a change it was from the small room, with no fire and one 
window (the glass broken out), and the aching side and worn-out eyes, to the 
' house of many mansions ! ' No more stitching until twelve o'clock at night, 
no more thrusting of the thumb by the employer through the work, to show it 
was not done quite right. Plenty of bread at last ! Heaven for aching heads ! 
heaven for broken hearts ! heaven for anguish-bitten frames ! Xo more sitting up 
until midnight for the coming of staggering steps ! Xo more rough blows across 
the temples ! No more sharp, keen, bitter curses ! Some of you will have no 
rest in this world. It will be toil and struggle and suffering all the way up. 
You will have to stand at your door fighting back the wolf with your own hand, 
red with carnage. But God has a crown for you. I want you to realize this 
morning that he is now making it, and whenever you weep a tear, he sets another 
gem in that crown; whenever you have a pang of body or soul, he puts another 
gem in that crown ; until, after a while, in all the tiara there will be no room for 
another splendor, and God will say to his angel, ' The crown is done ; let her up, 
that she may wear it.' And as the Lord of Righteousness puts the crown upon 
your brow, angel will cry to angel, ' Who is she ? ' and Christ will say, ' I will tell 
you who she is. She is the one that came up out of great tribulation, and had 
her robe washed and made white in the blood of the Eamb.' And then God will 



A CLUSTER OF GEMS 461 

spread a banquet, and he will invite all the principalities of heaven to sit at the 
feast, and the tables will blush with the best clusters from the vineyards of God 
and crimson with the twelve manner of fruits from the Tree of Life, and waters 
from the fountains of the rock will flash from the golden tankards, and the old 
harpers of heaven will sit there, making music with their harps, and Christ will 
point you out, amid the celebrities of heaven, saying : ' She suffered with me on 
earth, now we are going to be glorified together.' And the banqueters, no longer 
able to hold their peace, will break forth with congratulations : ' Hail ! hail ! ' 
And there will be handwritings on the wall — not such as struck the Babylonian 
noblemen with horror — but fire-tipped fingers, writing in blazing capitals of light 
and love, ' God hath wiped away all tears from all faces ! ' " 

THE COSTLIEST SONG ON EARTH 

" The ghastliest thing on earth is the remnant of a drunkard's home. The 
costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the song of 
the drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations — not a protective tariff, but 
a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, a tariff of death. This evil whets the knives of 
the assassins, cuts the most of the wounds of the hospital, makes necessary most 
of the almshouses, causes the most of the ravings of the insane asylum, and 
puts up most of the iron bars of the penitentiaries. It has its hand to-day on 
the throat of the American republic. It is the taskmaster of nations, and the 
human race crouches under its anathema. The song of the drunkards has for 
its accompaniment the clank of chains, the chattering teeth of poverty, the rattle 
of executioner's scaffold, the creaking door of the deserted home, the crash of 
shipwrecks, and the groan of empires. The two billion twenty million dollars 
which rum costs this country in a year, in the destruction of grain and sugar, and 
the supporting of the paupers and invalids and the criminals which strong drink 
causes, is only a small part of what is paid for this expensive song of the 
drunkards." 

A GLORIOUS VACATION 

" Let us all remember, if we are Christians, that we are going after a while, 
whatever be our circumstances now, to have a glorious vacation. As in summer 
we put off our garments, and go down into the cool sea to bathe, so we will put 
off these garments of flesh, and step into the cool Jordan. We will look around 
for some p^ace to lay down our weariness, and the trees will say : ' Come and 
rest under our shadow ; ' and the earth will say : ' Come and sleep in my bosom ; ' 
and the winds will say : ' Hush ! while I sing thee a cradle hymn ; ' and while 
six strong men carry us out to our last resting-place, and ashes come to ashes, 
and dust to dust, we will see two scarred feet standing amid the broken soil, and 
a lacerated brow bending over the open grave, while a voice, tender with all affec- 
tion, and mighty with all omnipotence, will declare : ' I am the Resurrection and 



462 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

the Life ; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall lie live.' Com- 
fort one another with these words." 

MARGARET'S DEATH 

" The snow was very deep, and it was still falling rapidly, when, in the first 
year of my Christian ministry, I hastened to see a young woman die. It was 
a very humble home. She was an orphan ; her father had been shipwrecked on 
the banks of Newfoundland. She had earned her own living. As I entered the 
room I saw nothing attractive. No pictures ; no tapestry ; not even a cushioned 
chair. The snow on the window casement was not whiter than the cheek of that 
dying girl. It was a face never to be forgotten. Sweetness and majesty of soul 
and faith in God had given her a matchless beauty, and the sculptor who could 
have caught the outlines of those features and frozen them into stone would have 
made himself immortal. With her large, brown eyes she looked calmly into the 
great eternity. I sat down by her bedside and said: 'Now tell me all your 
troubles and sorrows and struggles and doubts.' She replied : ' I have no doubts 
or struggles. It is all plain to me. Jesus has smoothed the way for my feet. I 
wish when you go to your pulpit next Sunday you would tell the people that religion 
will make them happy. " O Death, where is thy sting? " Mr. Talmage, I wonder 
if this is not the bliss of dying?' I said: * Yes, I think it must be/ I lingered 
around the couch. The sun was setting, and her sister lighted a candle. She 
lighted the candle for me. The dying girl, the dawn of heaven in her face, needed 
no candle. I rose to go, and she said : ' I thank you for corning. Good night ! 
When we meet again it will be in heaven — in heaven. Good night! Good night ! ' 
For her it was good night to tears, good night to poverty 7 , good night to death ; 
but when the sun rose again it was good morning. The light of another day 
had burst in upon her soul. Good morning! The angels were singing her wel- 
come home, and the hand of Christ was putting upon her brow a garland. Good 
morning! Her sun rising. Her palm waving. Her spirit exulting before the 
throne of God. Good morning! Good morning! The white lily of poor Mar- 
garet's cheek had blushed into the rose of health immortal, and the snows through 
which we carried her to the country graveyard were symbols of that robe which 
she wears, so white that no fuller on earth could whiten it. My sister, my daugh- 
ter, may your last end be like hers ! " 




DR.. TALMAGE'S INFLUENCE ON HIS TIMES 

HIS SERMONS IN RURAL DISTRICTS — USED IN PASTORLESS CHURCHES — IN FARM- 
HOUSES AND BARNS A MEANS OF GRACE IN NEEDY PEACES WHAT DR. TAL~ 

MAGE STOOD FOR — A CHAMPION OF THE BIBLE — INSISTED ON THE WHOLE 
BOOK — FAITHFUL TO THE OLD GOSPEL — DEFENCE OF MORALITY AND THE HOME. 
AN ELOQUENT ADVOCATE OF TEMPERANCE — BUSINESS MORALITY — FERVENT 
PATRIOTISM — HIS GLORIOUS OPTIMISM — THE EFFECT OF HIS MINISTRY ON THE 
WORLD 

iNE of the most gratifying results of the wide publication of Dr. Tal- 
mage's sermons was the subject of many testimonies which came to 
the office of The Christian Herald from rural districts. Time and again, 
the beginning of a church in some isolated district, previously desti- 
tute of religious services, was traced to some godly person who, in 
the parlor of a farmhouse, or in a barn, or schoolhouse, held a 
service at which a sermon by Dr. Talmage was read. Sometimes only the 
family and the farm laborers were present ; at other places the neighbors 
would come in, and so a religious interest was aroused which ultimately 
led to the organization of a church. Occasionally the statement would be 
made that in some church, without a pastor, the expected supply had failed 
to appear, and the waiting congregation would have been dismissed without a 
service, had not one person in the gathering, foreseeing the emergency, brought 
a copy of the journal containing Dr. Talmage's sermon, which was read to the 
people. Numerous, too, were the instances of individual good that the sermons 
did. Letters were sent by godly women who said, "My husband would not go 
to church ; he ridiculed all preachers, but I persuaded him to let me read Dr. 
Talmage's sermons to him, and he has become a changed character." Add to 
all these ministrations, the sick persons prevented from going to the sanctuary, 
the people who through age or infirmity were unable to travel long distances to 
the nearest church, who found solace and encouragement and spiritual nutri- 
ment in Dr. Talmage's sermons, and some idea can be formed of the preacher's 
far-reaching influence and the beneficial effect of the printed discourse. 

A conservative estimate, made some years before Dr. Talmage's death, fig- 
ured the number of readers of his sermons at twenty-five millions. That number 
was increased as the years passed. In every town of any importance, between 

463 



464 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

the Atlantic and the Pacific, his sermons were published in the local journal every 
week. That they were read, was proved by the fact that, year after year^ the 
editors eagerly sought them and made them a prominent feature of their Mon- 
day issue. Men so keenly alive as they to the tastes of their readers would 
not have continued the publication without some clear indication that they were 
welcome to their subscribers. It was so in Canada and even in Great Britain, 
where it is very unusual for newspapers to publish sermons. Latterly they were 
translated into other languages than English, and were published in various Euro- 
pean centres. What then, we may well ask, was likely to be their effect on this 
immense audience? What was the influence this man exerted on the people 
of his generation ? For what principles did he stand, and what was the char- 
acter of his teaching? 

HIS LOVE OF THE BIBLE 

Most conspicuous was his stalwart championship of the Bible. He believed 
most profoundly in the Old Book. To him, a passage of Scripture settled a 
question forever. It was the final authoritv which disposed of all further argu- 
ment. Some of his most famous sermons were devoted to a direct champion- 
ship of the Bible against the assaults of infidels. He contended for the reason- 
ableness of the inspired volumes and met on their own ground the foes of the 
book. His most telling passages, however, were not those in which he dealt 
with scientific objections, but those in which, with scathing indignation, he 
denounced the men who would rob the world of a book which had done so much 
good. He compared them to the thieves who would not scruple to steal the 
medicine from a dying man's bedside, and snatch the crutch from the hands of 
a cripple. Stronger arguments in defence of the Bible and Christianity have 
been made by scholars, but no man ever showed with greater force the value 
of the Bible to the world and civilization, and the despicable meanness of men 
who tried to undermine its influence. It was a mode of attack and defence pecu- 
liarly his own, and it won its way because he carried with him the consciences 
and the most hallowed memories of his audience. In many a city his valiant 
championship must have done inestimable service by showing in their true 
light the character and aims of the assailants of the Bible. 

No less vehement was his protest against the more insidious attack which 
under the guise of biblical criticism tends to weaken the authority of the Bible. 
He stood for the whole book, from cover to cover, and contended for the inspira- 
tion of every part. Nothing more delighted him than the finding of some obscure 
text which other preachers had neglected. He would show that it, too, was 
pure gold, valuable for exhortation, or consolation. Questions of the date and 
authorship of the various books of the Bible, he brushed away from him as 
unworthy of serious attention. The business of his life, as he saw it, was to 
preach the Word as we have it, and get out of it the lessons which experience 
has proved to be productive of practical good living. 



DR. TALMAGE'S INFLUENCE ON HIS TIMES 465 

FAITHFUL TO THE OLD GOSPEL 

It was a significant fact, too, that he stood for the old Gospel. The grim 
old Calvinistic theology, which so many preachers have abandoned, was very 
dear to him, but it was tempered in his mind by limitations which he would 
never admit to be Arminian, but which Calvin himself would never have accepted. 
He was impatient of discussions on matters of theory with which, he declared, 
men need not concern themselves. Their duty, he held, was to accept the free 
salvation which the Bible authorized him to offer, and leave the question of 
divine authority to eternity, when there would be more time to study it and a 
better light would shine upon it. His favorite illustration was a train speeding 
along a railroad. The lines of track represented divine sovereignty, the train 
was freewill proceeding along under divine impulse. But all that discussion 
was considered merely for the practical purpose of removing difficulties from the 
path of other minds. For himself, it was enough that the Gospel offer was free, 
and he pressed it on his hearers with all the vigor of a Methodist preacher. 
It was the old Gospel that was proclaimed in his sermons all the time ; the novelty 
was in his presentation of it. Rarely argumentative, he excelled in his power 
to paint glowing pictures of the joys of a religious life, and of the folly of reject- 
ing a Gospel so rich in blessing. It was something of inestimable importance 
in these days, when the Gospel is traduced and misrepresented, that the man to 
whom the people listened, held it in its purity and placed it before them in its 
most attractive light. 

THE INTEGRITY OF THE HOME 

The practical social influence of Dr. Talmage's sermons must also have 
been of an elevating character. He was a stalwart in his defence of the home 
and the marriage relation. His denunciation of polygamy, of easy divorce and 
social vice, has never been equalled in the pulpit. His lurid descriptions of the 
evil that follows the yielding to temptation were vivid realism, and must have 
stayed many a young man on his path to ruin. For those who had fallen, he 
had infinite pity; his entreaties to them to repent and reform were tender and 
earnest and full of encouragement ; but for those who were tempting them astray 
he had no mercy. They were the foes of morality, the curse of society, traitors 
to their country and their race. Love and reverence for parents ; fidelity to home 
and the conjugal relation; the obligation of parents to bring up their children 
in the nurture of the Lord — these were the duties he inculcated and they were 
duties which every patriotic citizen is glad to have taught to the people. 

Dr. Talmage was a strenuous advocate of temperance. He had a soulful 
abhorrence of intoxicating drink, which time and again he uttered with ringing 
eloquence. Here, as in all the topics he handled, he was less careful to argue 
for principle than to insist on the practical effect of his contention. " You will 
injure yourself in body, mind and soul by drinking intoxicants ; you will acquire 
a habit that will enslave you; you will ruin your interests in this world and 

30 



466 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AXD WORK 

destroy your hopes in the next, if you yield to the habit. Let it alone as you 
would a deadly serpent, or a fatal poison. Thus and thus only will you be safe." 
This was the gist of many a discourse, and he would point it with instances 
he had himself witnessed, of good and talented men who had fallen and whom 
he had vainly endeavored to save. Full of pathos and sympathy were those 
stories drawn by a hand that was masterly in its art. The cause of temperance 
owes him a deep debt of gratitude for his advocacy. 

BUSINESS MORALITY 

The Gospel Dr. Talmage proclaimed was emphatically a Gospel for the 
times. He contended for business morality, protested against the business tricks 
and impostures which delude the public, and, in bitter invective, denounced the 
men who gambled away in the stock market the patrimony of the orphan and 
the portion of the widow. The Christianity that would permit a church mem- 
ber to become a director of a bogus company, to lend his name to a fraudulent 
enterprise, was in his eyes rank hypocrisy, and, though he knew that his words 
reached the ears of wealthy men who had grown rich by fraud, he never qualified 
his terms of condemnation, but declared them base criminals, who instead of 
sitting in their comfortable church pews should be doing time in the penitentiary. 
He had also a word of caution for unscrupulous employers. The labor problem, 
he contended, would be settled beyond the possibility of disturbance, if employers 
would put their religion in their business. The Golden Rule was the remedy 
for all labor disputes, and men had need only to make it the rule of their conduct 
to adjust every difficulty. In these days such teaching needs to be uttered, and 
it was uttered by Dr. Talmage with mighty emphasis. 

FERVENT PATRIOTISM 

Dr. Talmage was intensely patriotic. He loved his country with ardent 
devotion. His discourse on Thanksgiving Dav. Decoration Day, on the Sunday 
nearest Independence Day, and near the autumnal elections, showed how near 
to his heart was the prosperity of his native land and how profound his con- 
viction that it is " righteousness which exalteth a nation." After his European 
trips he would come home with increased admiration for our Government and 
our institutions, and with words that thrilled patriotic hearts would declare 
that there was no country in all the earth to compare with the L'nited States. 
He never tired of warning his hearers against the foes of the nation, which he 
declared were Infidelity, Anarchy, Intemperance and Political Corruption. Peo- 
ple went out from the Tabernacle services, or rose from the reading of his 
sermons, with the feeling that they had a country to be proud of and institu- 
tions which it was their duty to defend. 

The most prominent characteristic of his sermons, however, was their bril- 
liant optimism. In the darkest times he insisted that there was light ahead, and 



DR. TALM AGE'S INFLUENCE ON HIS TIMES 



467 



" things would come out right." The church and the world were not 011 the 
way to catastrophe, but to glorious consummation. " This world is going to 
be saved," he declared, " and if you do not believe it, you have no faith in God." 
He insisted on the duty of cheerfulness, and painted a glorious picture of the 
future for the individual and for the church. " Triumph ahead " he would pro- 
claim, and bade every troubled soul hope for the best. How his cheering words 
must have encouraged the burdened and the sorrowful ! 

THE WORLD'S TEACHER 

It was a wholesome, elevating, cheering influence that Dr. Talmage exerted 
on the people of his time. One is glad that the preacher whom so many heeded 
was a man with so grand a message as that he delivered. The critics sneered 
and derided, but there can be no honest denial of the fact that the public needed 
just such teaching as he gave, and that the world would be a happier and a bet- 
ter world the more men embodied such teaching in their lives. It tended to 
purity, to kindliness, to helpfulness, to sympathy with the suffering, and to 
faith in the living God. None could doubt what he stood for in his time. The 
principles he represented, the advice he gave, the warnings he uttered were all on 
the side of morality and clean living, and none can ever estimate the far-reaching 
effect of his work. Like the patriarch of old, " After he had served his own 
generation by the will of God," he has fallen on sleep. 





DR. TALMAGE'S LOVE OF COUNTRY 

HIS VIEWS ON OUR NATIONAL BLESSINGS — COMPARISONS BETWEEN FOREIGN COUN- 
TRIES AND OUR OWN ONE REASON FOR THANKFULNESS AS A NATION 

N the course of his many journeyings to and fro in the world. Dr. Tal- 
mage, with the practised eye of a keen observer, noted the many advan- 
tages his own native land possessed over all others. Returning to 
America on one occasion, after an absence of several months abroad, 
he wrote: 

" I am asked, ' Now that you have seen so many countries, what do 
you consider the best place to live in ? ' I answer with all the emphasis that I can 
consider the best place to live in?' I answer with all the emphasis that I can 
command : ' The United States of America ? ' Had it not been so there would 
have been three hundred thousand Americans moving into Europe instead of 
three hundred thousand Europeans moving into America. 

" Have you realized our superior blessings atmospheric ? Have you thought 
of the fact that the most of the millions of the human race are in climates frigid 
or torrid or horrid? Take up the map of the world and thank God that you 
are so far off from Arctic icebergs on the one side and seven-feet-long cobras on 
the other. For what multitudes of the human race life is an Arctic expedition! 
Underground huts. Immeasurable barrenness. Life a prolonged shiver. Our 
front-door steps on a January night genial compared with thei 1 - climate. Ask 
some of the Arctic explorers about the luxuries of life around the North Pole. 
Instead of killing so many brave men in Polar, expeditions, we had better send 
messengers to persuade those pale inhabitants of polar climes to say good-bye 
to the eternal snows and abandon those realms of earth to the walrus and white 
bear, and shut up those gates of crystal, and come down into realm where the 
thermometer seldom drops below zero. Oh the beauties of Baffin's Bay, only 
six weeks in the year open ! What a delightful thing when in those Arci ic 
regions they milk their cows, and milk only ice cream. Let all those who live 
between thirty and fifty degrees of north latitude thank God, and have sympathy 
for the vast populations of both hemispheres who freeze between sixty and 
eighty degrees of latitude. 

" Then compare our atmosphere with the heated air infested with reptilian 
and insectile life in which most of the human race suffer. Think of India and 
China and Ethiopia. Travelers tell you of the delicious orange groves, but 
468 



DR. TALMAGE'S LOVE OF COUNTRY 469 

ask them about the centipedes. They tell of the odor of the forests, but ask them 
about the black flies. They tell you about the rich plumage of the birds, but 
ask them about the malarias. They tell you about the fine riders, but ask them 
about the Bedouins and bandits. They tell you about the broad piazzas, but 
ask them about the midnights with the thermometer at an insufferable one 
hundred and ten. Vast cities of the torrid clime without sewerage, without 
cleansing, packed, and piled up wretchedness and all discomfort. What beauti- 
ful hyenas ! What fascinating scorpions ! W nat sociable tarantulas ! What 
captivating lizards ! What wealth of bugs ! What an opportunity to study 
comparative anatomy and herpetology ! What a chance to look into the open 
countenance of the pleasing crocodile ! Hundreds of millions of people in such 
surroundings. I would rather live in one of our American cities in a house with 
two rooms than to live in the torrid lands and own all Mexico, all Brazil, all 
Hindostan, all Arabia, all China. In other words, I would rather live between 
thirty and fifty degrees of latitude and own nothing than to be between ten and 
thirty degrees of latitude. Thirty years of life in America, or a corresponding 
latitude, are worth more than eighty years of life anywhere else. We have the 
furs of the Arctic and the fruits of the Torrid with all the pleasurable respiration 
of the Temperate. God seems to say, ' Come down North wind with a tonic, 
and come up South wind with a balm, and mix a healthful draught for the 
lungs of this nation ! ' 

THE BEST LAND FOR THE WORKER 

" There is not a land where wages and salaries are so large for the great 
masses of the people. In India four cents a day and find yourself is good wages. 
In Ireland, in some parts, eight cents a day for wages, in England, a dollar a day 
good wages — vast populations not getting as much as that. In other lands fifty 
cents a day and twenty-five cents a day clear on down to starvation and squalor. 
An editor in England told me that his salary was seven hundred and fifty dollars 
a year, and he seemed satisfied ! Look at the great populations coming out of the 
factories of other lands, and accompany them to their homes, and see what priva- 
tion the hard-working classes on the other side the sea suffer. 

" The laboring classes in America are ten per cent better off than in any 
other country under the sun — twenty per cent, forty per cent, fifty per cent, 
seventy-five per cent. The toilers with hand and foot have better homes and better 
furnished. I do not write an abstraction. I know what I have seen. The stone- 
masons and carpenters and plumbers and mechanics and artisans of all styles in 
America have finer residences than the majority of professional men in Europe. 
You enter the laborer's house on our side the sea and you find upholstery and 
pictures and instruments of music. His children are educated at the best schools. 
His life is insured, so that in case of his sudden demise the family shall not be 
homeless. Let all American workingmen know that while their wages may not 
be as high as they would like to have them, America is the paradise of industry, 






470 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" There is no land on the earth where the political condition is so satisfactory 
as in ours. Every three years in the State and every four years in the nation we 
clean house. After a vehement expression of the people at the ballot-box in the 
autumnal election, they all seem satisfied, and if they are not satisfied, at any rate 
they smile. 

AN ENGLISHMAN'S QUESTION 

" An Englishman asked me in an English rail-train this question : ' How 
do you people stand it in America with a revolution every four years? Wouldn't 
it be better for you, like us, to have a queen for a lifetime and everything settled ? ' 
England changes government just as certainly as we do. At some adverse vote 
in Parliament out goes Disraeli and in comes Gladstone, out goes Gladstone in 
comes Salisbury, out goes Salisbury and in comes Gladstone again, or Lord 
Rosebery, or out goes Rosebery and in come Salisbury. Administrations change 
there, but not as advantageously as with us, for there they may change almost 
any day, while with us a party in power continues in power four years. 

"It is said that in our country we have more political dishonesty than in any 
other land. The difference is that in our country almost every official has a 
chance to steal, while in other lands a few people absorb so much that the others 
have no chance at appropriation. The reason they do not steal is, they cannot 
get their hands on it ! The governments of Europe are so expensive that after 
the salaries of the royal families are paid there is not much left to misappropriate. 

EUROPEAN BURDENS 

" The Emperor of Russia has a nice little salary of $8,210,000. The Emperor 
of Austria has a yearly salary of $4,000,000. England's ruler has a salary of 
$2,200,000. The royal plate of St, James' Palace is worth $10,000,000. The 
Court hairdresser gets $10,000 a year for combing the royal locks, while the 
most of us have to comb our hair at less than half that expense, if we have any 
to comb ! 

" Over there, there is a host of attendants, all on salaries, some of them 
$5000 and $6000 a year. Master of Buck Hounds, $8500 a year. Grand Fal- 
coner, $6000 a year. (I translate pounds into dollars.) Gentlemen of the Wine 
and Beer Cellars, Controller of the Household, Groom of the Robes, Mistress of 
the Robes, Captain of Gold Stick, Lieutenant of Silver Stick, Clerk of the Pow- 
der Closet, Pages of the Back Stairs, Maids of Honor, Master of Horse, Chief 
Equerry, Equerries in Ordinary, Crown Equerry, Hereditary Grand Falconer, 
Vice Chamberlain, Clerk of the Kitchen, Master of Forks, Grooms in Waiting, 
Lords in Waiting, Grooms of the Great Chamber, Sergeant at Arms, Barge 
Master and Waterman, Eight Bedchamber Women, Eight Ladies of the Bed- 
chamber, Ten Grooms of the Great Chain, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum, 
ad nauseam. 

" All this is only a type of the fabulous expense of foreign governments. All 
this paid out of the sweat and the blood of the people. Are the people satisfied ? 



DR. TALMAGE'S LOVE OF COUNTRY 471 

However much the Germans like William, and the Spaniards like their young 
King, and England likes her splendid Queen, these stupendous governmental 
expenses are built on a groan of dissatisfaction as wide as Europe. If it were 
left to the people of England, of Germany, of Austria, of Spain, of Russia, 
whether these expensive establishments should be kept up, do you doubt what 
the vote would be? 

" Now, is it not better that we be overtaxed and the surplus be distributed 
all over the land among the lobbv men, and that it go into the hands of 
hundreds and thousands of people — is there not a better chance of its finally 
getting down into the hands of honest people, than if it were all built up, piled 
up, inside a garden or palace? 

GREAT FORTUNES 

" The monopolistic oppression is less in America than anywhere else. 
The air is full of protest because great houses, great companies, great indi- 
viduals are building such overtowering fortunes. Stephen Girard and John 
Jacob Astor, stared at in their time for their august fortunes, would not now 
be pointed at in the streets of Philadelphia or New York as anything 
remarkable. These vast fortunes for some imply pinchedness of want for 
others. A great protuberance on a man's head implies the illness of the whole 
body. These estates of disproportioned size weaken all the body politic. But 
the evil is nothing with us compared with the monopolistic oppression abroad. 
Just look at their ecclesiastical establishments. Look at those vast cathedrals 
built at fabulous expense and supported by great ecclesiastical machinery at 
vast expense, and sometimes in an audience room that would hold a thousand 
people, twenty or thirty people gather for worship. The Pope's income is 
eight million dollars. Cathedrals of statuary and braided arch, and walls 
covered with masterpieces of Rubens and Raphael and Michael Angelo; against 
all the walls dashing seas of poverty and crime and filth and abomination. 
Ireland to-day one vast monopolistic devastation. About forty-five millions of 
people in Great Britain and yet all the soil owned by about thirty-two thousand. 
Statistics enough to shake the earth. Duke of Devonshire owning ninety-six 
thousand acres in Derby. Duke of Richmond owning three hundred thousand 
acres at Gordon Castle. Marquis of Breadalbane going on a journey of one 
hundred miles in a straight line, all on his own property. Duke of Sutherland 
has an estate as wide as Scotland, which dips into the sea on both sides. Bad 
as we have it in America, it is a thousand times worse there. 

A THRIFTY NATION 

" If in America a few fortunes overshadow all others, we must remember 
there is a vast throng of other people being enriched, and this fact shows the thrift- 
iness of the country. It is estimated that there are over six thousand millionaires 
in the United States. In addition to this, you must remember that there are 



472 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

successes on less extended scales. Tens of thousands of people worth five hun- 
dred thousand dollars ; scores of thousands worth one hundred thousands dollars 
each. Yea, the majority of the people of the United States are on their way to 
fortunes. They will either be rich themselves or their children will be rich. 

" If I should leave to some men the question : ' Will you have a fortune 
and your children struggle on through their lives in the struggle you have had 
to make — will you have the fortune, or would you rather that they should have 
the fortune ? ' Scores of men would say : ' I am willing to fight this battle all 
the way through and give my children a chance; I don't care so much about 
myself ; it's only for ten or twenty years, anyhow ; give my children a chance.' 
sending his sons to college, and without any opportunity for luxury himself, 
resolved that though he shall have it hard all the days of his life, his children 
shall have a good start. And although some of our people may have great 
commercial struggle, there is going to be a great opening for their sons and 
daughters as they come on to take their places in society. 

EUROPE OVERCROWDED 

" The domains of Europe and Asia are already full. Every place occupied, 
unless it be desert or volcano or condemned barrenness, while in America we have 
plenty of room, and the resources are only just opening. In other lands, if for- 
tunes fatten, they must fatten on others ; but with us they can fatten out of illim- 
itable prairies and out of inexhaustible mines. 

" You get in the cars in America, and you ride one hundred or one hundred 
and fifty miles ; then you come to a great city, as Philadelphia, as Albany, as 
Boston. I got on the cars at Manchester, and closed my eyes for a long sleep 
before I got to Liverpool. In forty minutes I was aroused out of my sleep by 
some one saying, * We are here ; this is Liverpool.' The cities crowded. The 
populations crowded, packed in between the Pyrenees and the Alps, packed in 
between the English Channel and the Adriatic, so closely they cannot move 
without treading either on each other's heels or toes. Sceptres clashing; chariot 
wheels colliding. The nations of Asia and Europe this moment wondering 
what next. But in our continent we have plenty of room and nobody to fight. 
Eight million square miles in North America and all but one-seventh capable of 
rich cultivation, implying what fertility and what commerce ! Four great basins 
pouring their waters into the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and Gulf of Mexico. Shore 
line of twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine miles. The one State 
of Texas with more square miles than all France, than all Germany. 



PLENTY OF ELBOW ROOM 

" That our continents might have plenty of elbow room and not be jostled 
by the effete governments of Europe, God sank to the depths of the sea a whole 



DR. TALMAGE'S LOVE OF COUNTRY 473 

continent that once ran from off the coast of Europe to the coast of America — 
the continent of Atlantis — which allowed the human race to pass from Europe 
to America on foot, with little or no shipping; that continent dimly described 
in history, but the existence of which has been proved by archaeological evidences 
innumerable; that whole continent sunken so that a fleet of German, British 
and American vessels had to take deep sea soundings to touch the top of it; 
that highway from Europe to America entirely removed so that for the most 
part only the earnest and the persevering and the brave could reach America and 
that through long sea voyage. 

" Governments on the southern tip of this continent are gradually coming 
to the time when they will beg for annexation. On the other hand, beautiful and 
hospitable Canada, the vast majority of the people there are more republican 
than monarchial in their feelings, and the chief difference between them and us 
is that they live on one side of the St: Lawrence and we on the other. The day 
will come when Canada will be found waiting for our government to propose 
marriage, and when we do so, she will down and blush, and, thinking of her 
allegiance across the sea, will say : ' Ask mother.' Peace all over the continent. 

THE FRANCHISE 

" The white flakes of our ballots fall every year in all the villages between 
the Highlands of Navesink and the Golden Gate of the Pacific, so silently that 
the keenest ear can not detect one out of the millions — snowing on until noon, 
snowing on until night. The octogenarian comes up to the polls with trembling 
hand, and scanning the ballot with spectacled eyes, gives it to the judge of elec- 
tion. The young man who has been patiently waiting the time when he would 
have a right to vote comes up, and proudly and blushingly hands in his suffrage 
and passes on. The capitalist with diamonded finger and the workman with 
hard fist comes up, and the vote of the one is as good as the vote of the other. 
Snowing, snowing, snowing, until at sundown all these flakes are united and 
compacted into an avalanche ready to slide down in expression of the nation's 
will. 

" We cannot live under any other form of government than that under which 
we are living. The stars of our flag are not the stars of thickening night, but 
stars sparkling amid the red bars of morning cloud. Let the despotisms of Asia 
keep their feet off the Pacific coast ! Let the tyrannies of Europe keep their feet 
off the Atlantic coast ! We shall have in this country only one government, and 
on this continent only one government. At the south, Mexico will follow Texas 
into the Union, and Christianity and civilization will stand in the halls of the 
Montezumas, and if not in our day, then in the day of our children, Yucatan 
and Central America will wheel into the line of dominion. On the north, Canada 
will be ours — not by conquest — for English and American swords may never 
Clash blades — but we will simply woo our fair neighbor of the north, and she 



474 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

will be ours. Then from Baffin's Bay to the Caribbean there shall be one Repub- 
lic, under one banner, and with one destiny — a free, undisputed, christianized, 
American continent ! 

OUR VAST RESOURCES 

" We have a better climate than in any other nation. We do not suffer from 
anything like the Scotch mist or the English fogs or from anything like the 
Russian ice blast or from the awful typhus of Southern Europe or the Asiatic 
cholera. Epidemics in America are exceptional — very exceptional. Plenty of 
wood and coal to make a roaring fire in winter time. Easy access to sea beach or 
mountain-top when the ardors of summer come down. Michigan wheat for the 
bread, Long Island corn for the meal, New Jersey pumpkins for the pies, Carolina 
rice for the queen of puddings, prairie fowl from Illinois, fish from the Hudson 
and the James, hickory and hazel and walnuts from all our woods, Louisiana 
sugar to sweeten our beverages, Georgia cotton to keep us warm, oats for the 
horses, carrots for the cattle, and oleomargarine butter for the hogs ! In our 
land all products and all climates that you may desire. 

"Are your nerves weak and in need of bracing up? Go North. Is your 
throat delicate and in need of balmy airs ? Go South. Do you feel crowded and 
want more room? Go West. Almost anything you want you can have. Plenty 
to eat, plenty to wear, plenty to read. 

" Yes ! yes ! I have seen the world for myself, and I come home more in love 
with America than ever before. 

OUR CONTINUAL BLESSING 

" See how good God has been to us ! Just open the map of the continent, 
and see how it is shaped for immeasurable prosperities. Navigable rivers, 
more in number and greater than of any other land, rolling down on all sides 
into the sea, prophesying large manufactures and easy commerce. Look at 
the great ranges of mountains timbered with wealth on the top and sides, 
metaled with wealth underneath. One hundred and eighty thousand square 
miles of coal ; one hundred and eighty thousand square miles of iron. The 
land so contoured that extreme weather hardly ever lasts more than three 
days — extreme heat or extreme cold. Climate for the most part bracing and 
favorable for brawn and brain. All fruits, all minerals, all harvests. Scenery 
displaying an autumnal pageantry that no land on earth pretends to rival. No 
South American earthquakes ; no Scotch mists ; no London fogs ; no Egyptian 
plagues ; no Germanic divisions. The people of the United States are happier 
than any people on earth. It is the testimony of every man that has traveled 
abroad. For the poor, more sympathy; for the industrious, more opportunity. 
Oh, how good God was to our fathers, and how good he has been to us and our 
children. To him ! Blessed be his mighty name ! 



DR. TALMAGE'S LOVE OF COUNTRY 475 

A WELCOME FOR ALL 

" We have been turning an important leaf in the mighty tome of our national 
history. One year at the gates of this continent over five hundred thousand 
immigrants arrived. I was told by the Commissioner of Immigration that the 
probability was that in that one year six hundred thousand immigrants would 
arrive at the different gates of commerce. Who were they, the paupers of 
Europe? No. At Kansas City I was told by a gentleman, who had oppor- 
tunity for large investigation, that a great multitude had gone through there, 
averaging in worldly estate eight hundred dollars. I was told by an officer of 
the Government, who had opportunity for authentic investigation, that thou- 
sands and thousands had gone, averaging one thousand dollars in possession 
each. I was told by the Commissioner of Immigration that twenty families 
that had recently arrived brought eighty-five thousand dollars with them. Mark 
you, families, not tramps. Additions to the national wealth, not subtractions 
therefrom. I saw some of them reading their Bibles and their hymn books, 
thanking God for his kindness in helping them cross the sea. Some of them 
had Christ in the steerage all across the waves, and they will have Christ in the 
rail trains which at five o'clock every afternoon start for the great West. 

NO DANGER OF OVERCROWDING 

" Are you afraid this continent is going to be overcrowded with this popula- 
tion ? Ah, that shows you have not been to California ; that shows you have not 
been to Oregon ; that shows you have not been to Texas. A fishing smack on Lake 
Ontario might as well be afraid of being crowded by other shipping before night 
as for any one of the next ten generations of Americans to be afraid of being over- 
crowded by foreign populations in this country. The one State of Texas is far 
larger than all the Austrian Empire, yet the Austrian Empire supports thirty-five 
million people. The one State of Texas is larger than all France, and France sup- 
ports thirty-six million people. The one State of Texas far surpasses in size the 
Germanic Empire, yet the Germanic Empire supports forty-one million people. 
I tell you the great want of the Western States is more population. 

FREE AMERICA 

" "W mile some people may stand at the gates of the city saying, ' Stay back ! ' 
to foreign populations, I press out as far beyond those gates as I can press out 
beyond them and beckon to foreign nations, saying : ' Come, come ! all ye people 
who are honest and industrious and God-loving ! ' But say you : ' I am so 
afraid that they will bring their prejudices for foreign governments and plant 
them here.' Absurd. They are sick of the governments that have oppressed 
them, and they want free America ! Give them the great gospel of welcome. 
Throw around them all Christian hospitalities. They will add their industry 






476 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 



and hard-earned wages to this country, and then we will dedicate all to Christ, 
and ' thy land shall be married.' 

" But where shall the marriage altar be? Let it be the Rocky Mountains, 
when, through artificial and mighty irrigation, all their tops shall be covered, as 
they will be, with vineyards, and orchards, and grain fields. Then let the Bostons, 
and the New Yorks, and the Charlestons of the Pacific coast come to the marriage 
altar on the one side, and then let the Bostons and the New Yorks and the Charles- 
tons of the Atlantic coast come to the marriage altar on the other side, and there 
between them let this bride of nations kneel; and then if the organ of the loudest 
thunders that ever shook the Sierra Nevadas on the one side, or moved the foun- 
dations of the Alleghenies on the other side, should open full diapason march, 
that organ of thunders could not drown the voice of Him who would take the hand 
of this bride of nations, saying, ' as a bridegroom rejoiceth over a bride, so thy 
God rejoiceth over thee.' At that marriage banquet the platters shall be of Nevada 
silver, and the chalices of California gold, and the fruits of Northern orchards, 
and the spices of Southern groves, and the tapestry of American manufacture, 
and the congratulations from all the free nations of earth and from all the tri- 
umphant armies of heaven." 





A FILIAL TRIBUTE 

MEMORIAL SERMON BY THE REV. FRANK DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D., SON OE THE DIS- 
TINGUISHED PREACHER, DELIVERED IN THE JEEEERSON PARK PRESBYTERIAN 
CHURCH, CHICAGO, APRIL 20, IQ02 

Text : I. Kings 19 :20 : " Let me, I pray thee, kiss my father/' 

FFECTION'S most sacred form of salutation is a kiss. We bow to 
an acquaintance ; we shake hands with a friend ; but we press the lip 
against the lip of one whom we love. This statement is especially 
true when applied to Elisha, the son of Shaphat, who was about to 
leave home, and go forth into the great wide world. Elisha was 
summoned to carry on the work of Elijah. Already the horses were 
being harnessed in the chariot of fire for the old prophet's famous journey from 
early struggle to heavenly triumph. His successor, starting out on his arduous 
task, desires first to imprint on his father's face the kiss of farewell. 

" The salutation of the kiss is even more sacred when used by one who is 
standing by the open casket of a father whose eloquent tongue has so often 
spoken the golden words of the Gospel to countless throngs — who, with a pen 
guided by a spirit sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb, has every week pro- 
claimed the divine message to millions upon millions of readers who were 
wearied with sin and heavy with' trouble. My father's work for nearly twenty 
years has been the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night to guide 
great multitudes through the dark wilderness of earth towards the brightness 
of the Promised Land, 

" Many pens are writing eulogies upon the lifework of Rev. T. DeWitt Tal- 
mage. Perhaps a few words may be welcome from his son. I speak as one 
having authority. For over twenty years I was his constant companion. When 
he was at home, I rarely left his study until after the midnight hour. Twice with 
him I visited the European cities. Once we circled the globe. Together we 
sailed forth from the Golden Gate of the Pacific. Side by side we have seen the 
light at the entrance of New York Harbor beckon us into the Narrows, welcome 
to us as was the Star of Bethlehem to the three astrologers wandering over the 
sea of sand. But no more shall we have sweet companionship. The world 
becomes instantly changed to the son who is compelled to let his parent sleep 

477 







478 



THE REV. FRANK DE WITT TALMAGE Lom^K^sch' 



A FILIAL TRIBUTE 



479 



among the flowers, and who hears a summons to more strenuous service. Before 
I start forth anew for my life's work, I would, with filial emotion, ask a moment 
for a tribute of personal affection, as Elisha did of Elijah. ' Let me, I pray thee, 
kiss my father . . . then I will follow thee.' 

A UNIQUE PERSONALITY 

" My father was the most original and yet the most natural man I ever knew. 
Original, in the sense that he always did everything in a way different from any 
one else. He wrote differently ; he lectured differently ; he preached differently. 
If two persons stood before him at the nuptial altar his marriage ceremony was 
unique. It was impossible to compare him to any one else. The mould used 
for the formation of his character was a special one. There has never been 
made another like unto it since he lay in his humble cradle in the Boundbrook 
farmhouse. 




JEFFERSON PARK CHURCH 



480 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

" Yet my father was natural in the sense that he never strove to be original 
and different from every one else. It was in his personality that he was differ- 
ent. He was the same in the home as in the pulpit. On the street as upon the 
lecture platform. He was the same original and yet natural character when 
writing to one of his children as he was when penning an article for the press. 
He uttered the message which was given to him as naturally and yet with the 
dissimilarity that characterizes the notes of the birds of the forest. As the brown- 
winged thrush lifts his treble note when he is awakened by the rising sun ; as 
a goldfinch chirrups when hopping between the garden rows ; as a Baltimore 
oriole sings when he swings backward and forward upon the tree branch which 
overhangs the brook; each bird is melodious in its own way, yet each is singing a 
different song. He was so natural that he could not recognize his peculiar traits. 
One day he turned to me and said : ' Frank, people say I am different from 
other ministers ; that I am different even in giving out my notices and the read- 
ing of Scripture. Show me how I am different.' When I attempted to show 
him the difference, he innocently remarked. ' Why, I do not see anything peculiar 
about that.' He was so different from other men that for many years the Amer- 
ican pulpit could not understand him. Under the scrutinizing eye of the theo- 
logical critic there could be found no heretical flaw in his sermons. When he 
arose to preach, a solemn stillness, like the expectant hush of the coming Judg- 
ment Day, silenced his auditors. Every eye was focused upon that tall, straight 
form, and broad, massive brow. Each ear was alert to catch the first word 
which fell from those wonderful lips. But though the buildings in which he 
preached in our own and other lands were always crowded to hear him, though 
great multitudes were brought to decision for Christ under his preaching in the 
Brooklyn Tabernacle, where he passed the most active years of his life's min- 
istry, yet for years he was a misunderstood man. 

" With one wave of his hand he swept all the cobwebs which had accu- 
mulated around the traditional methods of sermonic oratory. With his mighty 
original personality he broke the shackles of ecclesiastical slavery. He proved 
to the world that the ministers of the twentieth century could plead with sin- 
ners to come to Christ with the energy and enthusiasm and intensity with which 
the lawyer could plead for the life of a defendant falsely charged with murder. 
He proved to the religious world that it was not so important what kind of a 
white linen operating gown the Gospel surgeon wore, as it was that the nerve of 
the operator be firm and the hands steady that held the keen, sacred blade with 
which he cut out the cancer of sin. He dispensed with the ministerial gown and 
hurled from the church the old-fashioned pulpit, but he still clung to the old truths. 
He spoke the Gospel message in its simplicity. Because the story was so simply 
told with originality. 

" My father was a Gospel minister who completely consecrated himself, 
body and mind and soul, to his work. For thirty-five years his pulpit was the 



A FILIAL TRIBUTE 481 

sole business of his life. He lived and breathed and ate and slept and walked ana 
nursed his strength only for that. He had the most tremendous capacity for 
work of any man I ever knew, and even after he was turned seventy, his form 
was as straight as a mountain pine, his eye as clear as the eagle's, and his mental 
force unabated. On that last Gospel journey upon which he set out on Feb- 
ruary 12, he preached in rapid succession to great audiences at Macon, Charles- 
ton, Richmond and New Orleans, with his wonted eloquence and power, and 
it was not until the deadly Mexican climate had sapped his strength that he 
succumbed. Never from the first day of his ministry till the day of his death 
did he put off the harness of the Lord's service. When he went on lecturing 
tours it was not to make money or to take pleasure, but to get away from his 
home tasks so that he could come back refreshed to do more valiant service for 
Christ. Every family physician who entered our home declared that the rest 
of railroad travel had been his physical salvation. It forced him to the repose 
that he would not otherwise allow to himself. He was a genius, but he developed 
every one of his ten talents by the hardest kind of mental and physical application. 
No labor for him was too full of drudgery. Morning, noon and night found him 
in his study. He took physical exercise, not for pleasure, but to fit himself for 
the pulpit. He lived not to eat, but he ate so that he could live. He placed his 
standard very high, and into every sermon he put his best thought. He used to 
say to me, ' Frank, do not make the mistake of many literary men. They say to 
themselves, I will save that thought, and put it into another speech or article. 
Give to the world the best you have. Crowd everything in that strengthens an 
argument, but always strive for quality and not for quantity.' When a theological 
student, I wanted to occupy for some weeks the pulpit of a small country church. 
He uttered his protest, saying, ' You ought to spend at least three months upon 
your first sermon, writing upon it from six to ten hours a day.' What a testimony 
is this to his own careful work, coming from the cold lips which are now closed 
in the casket. What a homiletic lecture it is for the young ministers, for the 
young lawyers and budding statesmen who maintain that the oratorical art is a 
divine gift which has no need for struggling upon the rough mountain-side of 
drudgery. What a clarion note it is, summoning all men and women to do their 
best under all conditions. The lesson is as powerful for the merchant of ten 
talents as for the clerk of two talents. ' To him that hath shall be given. From 
him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.' 

" There is, however, a warning that comes from my father's intense applica- 
tion to work, which deserves the attention of all those who are bending their 
physical, mental and spiritual energies to accomplish something in life's struggle. 
My father had one of the most robust physical frames ever given to man. He 
had a wonderful mind ; he had a wonderful body ; he could speak out of doors for 
two long hours and address ten thousand auditors — yet the last sentence would 
be heard as distinctly as the first. He could do a ten-mile tramp more easily than 
3i 



482 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

some men could walk around a city square. His chest was broad and deep. His 
heart went on with the steady regularity of a pumping engine. He thought he 
was taking care of himself, but he was not. About twenty-five years ago, the first 
danger signal was lifted when insomnia, like a hideous spectre, sat at the foot 
of his bed and refused to let him sleep. Night after night he would be up four 
and five times walking the floor. After a while the children became used to it. We 
would greet him at breakfast, saying, ' Father, how did you sleep ? ' and when 
he answered, ' Not very well,' he would look so fresh and vigorous that we, too, 
were deceived and we would hope that he had slept better than he thought he did. 
But he could not be induced to spare himself. He over-estimated his reserve of 
strength. My father ought to have lived with that magnificent body at least 
fifteen years longer. Had he economized his strength, the best years of his life 
might have been those last fifteen years. He died from overwork. 

" Ye brain workers, listen to this warning! Ye literary men, who are full of 
great thoughts, which you are eager to utter, beware of overdriving the brain ! 
Remember that you cannot take your workshop to bed with you and work 
in the dark without undermining your mental strength. Heed to-day the message 
which comes to all. Stop before it is too late. God did not intend my father to 
go on as he was doing, wrecking his magnificent physical frame. 

" My father was a Gospel minister of unbounded cheerfulness. He believed 
that there was as much true religion in the smile seen at the wedding of Cana, of 
Galilee, as in the sob heard in a house of mourning. He was an optimistic 
Christian whose mind was free from gloomy presentiments. In his youth, he 
grasped the great truth that God is love. Because God was love, he felt that God 
approved of his being strong, and well, and happy. He always expected good 
things to come to him from the Divine Father, as a little child naturally expects 
good things to come to. him from an earthly parent. A falling tear may, ere 
it drops, lodge in the wrinkles of a smile. A rainbow can climb over the dark 
clouds of storm. If a member of the family was dangerously sick he was not dis- 
mayed, but always felt that they would get well. If financial trouble threatened 
the home, he never was apprehensive, having unwavering faith that the God who 
cares for the birds of the air and clothes the lily of the field, would feed and 
clothe him and those he loved. He was willing to undertake big things, because 
he was walking hand-in-hand with his Heavenly Father, accompanied by the 
sweet-faced angel of Hope. The result was that when trouble did come, he was 
the stronger to meet and bear it. And when greater opportunities of usefulness 
came than even he expected, he was also able to grasp them, and compel them 
to carry him upon their broad shoulders up the towering heights of conspicuous 
service. 

" What spirit but one buoyed by cheerfulness could ever have overcome the 
obstacles he conquered ? He was tried by fire literally as well as figuratively. He 
had to fight the elements, as well as the human champions of sin. Read the history 



A FILIAL TRIBUTE 483 

of the first Brooklyn Tabernacle. The little handful of seventeen members who 
originally called him to Brooklyn grew to thousands. During a time of national 
financial panic succeeding the Civil War, at great expense the noble walls of the 
first Tabernacle arose. The building was dedicated amid congratulations and the 
well wishes of the cicy and State. In a few months that building was destroyed. 
The whole structure was tumbled into ruins so quickly that nothing was saved 
from the huge edifice except an immense mortgage. Homeless and in debt, the 
outlook for the congregation was very dark. Undaunted, however, the stalwart 
leader called his faithful followers - about him. Many were discouraged, but not 
this modern Nehemiah. The second Brooklyn Tabernacle, built upon the ruins, 
was grander and more majestic than the first. This was the structure where the 
crowds became so great that it seemed as if no man who visited New York felt 
that he had made the best of his sojourn in the great city until he had heard my 
father preach. But there seems sometimes a terrible sequence in calamities. As 
certain diseases have a penchant for destroying certain families, so this fire demon 
came to find new prey in the place where he had once held high carnival. The 
second Brooklyn Tabernacle was destroyed. The third building went the same 
way as did the first and second. 

" Domestic bereavement fell upon him, and people who saw only his 
outward cheerfulness, had no conception how deeply the iron had entered his 
soul. When my father was dying he continually talked about the boy who had 
been his pride, his eldest son, who is now sleeping by his side as he once sat at 
his feet. He was a noble lad. A brilliant young lawyer. We carried him one 
cold winter day and laid him away to rest under a soft quilt of snow. My father 
went back to his work. He said, ' I dare not lay it down even for an hour, lest 
the effort to take it up again should be too great for me; He took up his cross 
in the same cheerful, hopeful spirit which was cut by the grave-digger's spade. 
Yes, he had his troubles ; but he always maintained a brave heart, and made the 
most out of life by being cheerful. 

HIS FATHER'S BEST SERMON 

" My father's best sermon was the daily life which he lived in his own home. 
I bear my testimony to the fact that from my boyhood until the time that I 
entered my own parsonage and was ordained by him for my own pulpit, I had 
before me the example and upon me the sweet influence of a Christian home. 
There never was in America a happier or more prayerful home than that of which 
he was the head. The children idolized him. The example he set before them 
was that of a consecrated Christian gentleman, always anxious to do what Christ 
would have him do. There was no bitterness in the nursery. From him we 
learned how to forget as well as how to forgive. Among all the men I have 
known in various walks of life, I never knew a human being who was like him 
in the characteristic that he could never bear a grudge against any one. An 



484 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

enemy might do everything in his power to destroy him, but my father never 
struck back. If he could, he would not only forgive, but he would go any distance 
to serve and help an enemy. Among the many homes I have visited as a pastor, 
I never entered one where the parent has so earnestly sought to inculcate gentle- 
ness of rule as he did in my old home. My father never lifted a hand to strike a 
blow. Yet he ruled his children with a rod stronger than one made out of iron. 
It was the rod of love. My sisters and myself had but one fear in reference to 
his life. We were afraid to do anything wrong for fear of seeing a wounded look 
pass over the kind face, which to us always reflected the light which shone from 
the divine face of Christ. Family prayers were not to us a meaningless formality. 
We felt that our dear father was taking us to the throne of Grace, as Joseph, the 
Good, brought his brethren into the throne room of the Egyptian king. 

" Reputation is what the world thinks about a man. Character is what he really 
is. Reputation may be wrong. Character is an actual fact. Man looketh upon 
the outward appearance ; God looketh upon the heart. But I have sometimes felt 
that God has made it possible for other eyes, as well as his own all-seeing eye, 
to look into a man's heart. The child has the opportunity and the privilege of 
looking into the parent's heart. When a boy lives for years by the side of a 
father, he knows what are the ruling principles of his life, its strongest motives 
and fundamental beliefs. When I lived at home or traveled by my father's side, 
continually with him for weeks or months at a time, I formed the conviction that 
he was as good a man as ever lived. I loved to hear him preach, because I knew 
and could testify that his spoken words were the echo of a sweet, gentle, loving 
Christian life — a life which was being lived for God. 

THE HOLY SPIRIT INSPIRED HIM 

"•My father was a Christian minister assuredly inspired by his work by the 
Holy Spirit. For a quarter of a century his critics have been trying by analyzing 
his character and his sermons to discover how he came to attain world-wide suc- 
cess. Some attribute his power to word-painting. He was an unequalled master 
in the art of portraying before an audience ancient and modern scenes and events, 
and opening up to the entranced gaze of his hearers the palaces of dead kings and 
queens. He could, with a few words, transport an audience into the hanging 
gardens of Babylon, or make them hear the harvests sigh or the nightingale sing. 
Some have attributed his power to invective. No rapier was sharper than the 
stiletto of his tongue when he wanted to execrate sin. Some again have ascribed 
his popularity to his loving personality. But the critics who only go as far as these 
do but touch the outer garment of his power. These traits were all present, 
but the source of my father's power was not in what he himself could do. As 
he often averred, with the sincerity of profound conviction, in and of himself he 
could do nothing. With the power of the Holy Spirit he could accomplish any- 
thing. 



A FILIAL TRIBUTE 485 

" It was because my father's sermons were the products of a Spirit-filled life 
that the millions were able to find comfort in them. Whenever he would take 
a lecture trip the people would crowd about him by the thousands, uttering such 
greetings as, ' I read your sermon on " Tears " by my baby's casket and I have 
found Christ.' ' I read your sermon upon " Recognition of Friends in Heaven " 
to my mother when she was dying.' ' I read this or that when I was in a certain 
trouble and the sermon brought light to my soul.' Let no hearer or reader of 
this sermon think for one instant that my father's work was a man-made work. 
My father's work was a divinely-inspired work. He was called as certainly to do 
his work as Paul, or Peter, or John, were called to do theirs. He was inspired 
by prayer and communion with God, and just as certainly may we in our work 
be inspired if we plead for the gift of the Holy Spirit. 

THE DEATHBED SCENE 

" Would you go with me into the death chamber ? His passing away was as 
he himself would have had it if his own wish had been consulted. He prac- 
tically died in the harness. One Sunday he was preaching in Mexico, the next 
on his deathbed. For five long Aveeks he lingered, but God mercifully benumbed 
the worn out and tired brain. He suffered not at all. He awoke long enough to 
recognize and at times call for his wife and children. But conversation was an 
impossibility between him and the members of his family during the weary days 
and nights he was sick. We were all there, all except those of the family who had 
preceded him to the other side and who were waiting to give him a welcome. 
We repeated the old verse so often spoken by his own lips : 

' When round my dying bed assembled those I love.' 

" A dear old family friend uttered a sweet prayer. That was all. We watched 
and waited until his mortal life was lifted into the heavenly life. There were a 
few tears. A few callings of good-bye. He slipped away so quietly, we could not 
tell when he was gone. He was asleep. The tired heart ceased to beat. The 
old sweet restful look came back to the loving face. We laid him away for a 
little while in the family plot in beautiful Greenwood. As I lifted my hand over 
the open grave to pronounce the benediction, I said to myself : ' So may we all 
live and labor, that when our work is done, we may go to our rest in the full 
conviction that when we awake it will be like this glorified spirit in the likeness of 
his Lord.' " 




IN HIS FATHER'S FOOTSTEPS 

THE CAREER OF THE BRILLIANT YOUNG SON AND SUCCESSOR OF THE GREAT 
PREACHER — THE REV. FRANK DE WITT TALMAGE, WHO INHERITS MUCH OF 
HIS ELOQUENCE AND ABILITY — DR. TALMACE'S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 



INCE the death of Dr. Talmage, the eyes and expectations of a very 
large portion of the Christian people of this country have turned 
toward his son. As was the case with both Spurgeon and Moody, it 
was naturally expected that Dr. Talmage would choose his son to 
carry forward the work of his world-wide ministry, which has been 
so abundantly blessed to multitudes during the last half century. That 
this was Dr. Talmage's dearest wish and desire was well-known to his most 
intimate friends and associates. 

From boyhood, Frank DeWitt Talmage was a consecrated child — conse- 
crated to spiritual effort, just as his father had been before him. He was 
literally born into the ministry. As a young man, he was deeply and per- 
manently influenced by the close companionship of his father, and by the 
latter s glorious example as a preacher who knew only " Christ and Him 
Crucified." Twelve years of ministerial experience have only served to 
strengthen and broaden that influence. 

The Rev. Frank DeWitt Talmage was born in Philadelphia on November 
29, 1867, and received his early education at the Polytechnic Institute in 
Brooklyn. In 1886 he entered the New York University, and graduated from 
there in the spring of 1890, being named as the orator of his class, an honor 
which his father received in the same University in 1853. On leaving college 
he entered Union Theological Seminary to study for the ministry. He has 
held pastoral charges in Philadelphia and Pittsburg, and in both cities he not 
only became exceedingly popular, but his labors were attended by excellent 
spiritual results. As pastor of Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church, Chicago. 
he made a wonderful record. 

INHERITS HIS FATHER'S TALENT 

Dr. Frank DeWitt Talmage possesses many of the characteristics that 
distinguished his late father. He is tall and strongly built, his expression is 
486 



IN HIS FATHER'S FOOTSTEPS 487 

pleasing, and his voice genial and resonant. In the pulpit he is magnetic, and 
so holds his audience by virtue of his extraordinary gift of natural eloquence, 
that one, on hearing him, ceases to be surprised at his popularity. His ser- 
rnonic delivery is marked by tremendous earnestness and impressive gestures ; 
and it is quite clear to all his auditors that he is " a man with a message.'' 
That message is the old, old Gospel story, with its infinite variations and its 
nameless charm for all human hearts — the story that formed the theme of 
T. DeWitt Talrnage's life-work, and which is now inspiring the labors of his 
only son and ministerial successor. 

Dr. Frank DeWitt Talmage has traveled widely here and abroad, and has 
spoken to large gatherings in many places, both in the pulpit and on the lecture 
platform. At Nazareth, Pa., he made a Gospel address to a great audience of 
farmers on the race-track, holding their attention by one of the finest oratorical 
efforts ever heard in that region. In conjunction with his father, he shared the 
labor and helped reap the spiritual harvest during the great series of revival 
mass-meetings in New York City several years ago, when father and son spoke 
from the stages of different theatres to vast audiences. He has also spoken from 
the platform in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Newark, Baltimore and other cities. He 
was his father's companion on the last round-the-world tour which Dr. Talmage 
undertook. At that time the young minister made the personal acquaintance of 
many leading men in other lands. 

STUDENT OF NATURE 

In his preaching, the Rev. Frank DeWitt Talmage adheres strictly to scrip- 
tural lines and to the orthodox Gospel. His discourses are replete with illus- 
tration and incident, and abound in imagerv and epigram. He is an ardent 
student of nature and rural life, and many of his brightest passages are drawn 
from wood and valley, stream and field, farmhouse and cabin. He is a natural 
orator, whose fresh, vivid, forceful utterances are everywhere appreciated, while 
his clear and simple exposition of the Gospel message carries with it a con- 
vincing power that reaches and influences many hearts. 



DR. TALMAGE'S WILL 

The will of Dr. Talmage was filed in Washington, April 21, 1902. He 
left an estate valued at more than $300,000, of which about $250,000 is in per- 
sonal property, consisting of secured notes, United States 4 per cent, bonds, 
stocks and cash in bank, furniture and household effects. The real estate is 
worth about $50,000, comprising his house in Washington and property in East 
Hampton, Long Island, and in his former home, Brooklyn. 

The Washing-ton Loan and Trust Company was named as executor. The 
will gave the widow's third to Mrs. Talmage and the remainder share and share 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

alike equally to all of his children and their lineal descendants. The heirs-at-law 
are as follow: The widow, Mrs. Eleanor M. Talmage, of this city, and his 
children, Mrs. Jessie T. Smith and Mrs. May Mangam, both of Brooklyn ; Mrs. 
Edith L. Donnon, Richmond, Va. ; Frank DeWitt Talmage, Chicago ; Miss Jennie 
G. Talmage, of this city, and Mrs. Maud T. Wickoff, Cape Vincent, N. Y. 

LITERARY TRUSTEES 

Dr. Talmage's widow, his son, Frank DeWitt Talmage, of Chicago, and 
Louis Klopsch, of New York, were appointed literary trustees under a codicil 
dated March 15, 1901. The will gave to the son, Frank, all the books, manu- 
scripts and copyrights thereon now or hereafter secured, in trust to superin- 
tend, manage and control their printing, publishing and sale, and gave his son 
exclusive control of all contracts existing at the time of the testator's death 
relating to all literary work, with full and unrestricted authority to fulfil and 
enforce them for the benefit of the estate. Of all moneys arising from the lit- 
erary production he was to distribute one-third of the net proceeds to the 
testator's widow, and the remaining two-thirds equally among all of his children, 
share and share alike, the issue of any deceased child or children to receive the 
parent's share. The will gave Dr. Talmage's fine library and all books, except 
as otherwise provided, to Frank, in trust. The gold enameled tea service 
presented to Dr. Talmage by the Emperor of Russia was given to the widow, 
and after her death to the eldest surviving child, then to the next oldest and 
so on, and finally absolutely to the last survivor among the children. The rest 
of the estate, both real and personal, was bequeathed as follows : One-third 
share to the widow, her heirs and assigns absolutely, and the remaining two- 
thirds to all of his children equally, share and share alike, the lineal descendants 
of any deceased child to take the parent's portion. 

Dr. Talmage was three times married. His first wife was Miss Mary Avery, 
of Brooklyn. A son, Thomas (who died in his nineteenth year), and a daughter, 
Jessie, were the fruits of this union. A great sorrow shadowed his life when 
Mrs. Talmage was accidentally drowned in the Schuylkill River, near Philadel- 
phia, in 1862. His second marriage was with Miss Susie Whittemore, and five 
"hildren were born to them. Again bereaved by death of his matrimonial com- 
,:nion, he married in 1899, Mrs. Collier, of Allegheny, who survives him. 




THE LAST SERMON HE EVER WROTE 

A PAEAN OE JUBILEE AND THANKSGIVING FOR ALL THE BLESSINGS OE A LONG AND 
GODLY LIEE 

T is a significant coincidence that the last sermon ever written by the 
great preacher, whose prevailing note throughout the forty-six years or 
his ministry was one of joy and praise and good cheer, should have been 
devoted to a paean of jubilation for present blessings and joys yet to be 
revealed. It was written just before he started on his Mexican journey 
and was published on February 3, 1902. His text was Psalms 33 :2 : 
" Sing unto him with a psaltery and an instrument of ten strings." Following 
is the sermon in full : 

a A musician, as well as poet and conqueror and king, was David, the author 
of my text. He first composed the sacred rhythm, and then played it upon a 
harp, striking and plucking the strings with his fingers and thumbs. The harp 
is the oldest of musical instruments. Jubal invented it, and he was the seventh 
descendant from Adam. Its music was suggested by the twang of the bow- 
string. Homer refers to the harp in the Iliad. It is the most consecrated of all 
instruments. The flute is more mellow, the bugle more martial, the cornet more 
incisive, the trumpet more resonant, the organ more mighty, but the harp has a 
tenderness and sweetness belonging to no other instrument that I know of. It 
enters into the richest symbolism of the Holy Scriptures. The captives in their 
sadness ' hung their harps upon the willows.' The raptures of heaven are repre- 
sented under the figure of ' harpers harping on their harps.' We learn from 
coins and medals that in the Maccabean age the harp had only three strings. 
In other ages, it had eight strings. Jerome speaks of the harp as having twenty- 
four strings. David's harp had ten strings, and when his great soul was afire 
with the theme, his sympathetic voice, accompanied by exquisite vibration of the 
chords, must have been overpowering. 

IRREPRESSIBLE GRATITUDE 

" With as many things to complain about as any man ever had, David wrote 
more anthems than any other man ever wrote. He puts even the frosts and hail- 
storms, and tempests, and creeping things, and flying fowl, and the mountains, and 
the hills, and day, and night into a chorus. Absalom's plotting and Ahithophel's 
treachery, and hosts of antagonists, and sleepless nights, and a running sore 
could not hush his psalmody. Indeed, the more his troubles, the mightier his 
sacred poems. The words ' praise ' and ' song ' are so often repeated in his 

489 






490 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

psalms that one would think the type-setter's case containing the letters with 
which those words are spelled would be exhausted. 

" In my text David calls upon the people to praise the Lord with an instru- 
ment of ten strings like that which he was accustomed to finger. The simple fact 
is that the most of us, if we praise the Lord at all, play upon one string, or two 
strings, or three strings, when we ought to take a harp fully chorded and with 
glad fingers sweep all the strings. Instead of being grateful for here and there 
a blessing we happen to think of, we ought to rehearse all our blessings so far as 
we can recall them, and obey the injunction of my text to sing unto him with an 
instrument of ten strings. 

" Have you ever thanked God for delightsome food? What vast multitudes 
are a-hungered from day to day, or are obliged to take food not toothsome or 
pleasant to the taste? What millions are in struggle for bread? A Confederate 
soldier went to the front, and his family were on the verge of starvation, but 
they were kept up by the faith of a child of that household, who, noticing that 
some supply was sure to come, exclaimed : ' Mother, I think God hears when we 
scrape the bottom of the barrel.' 

" Have you appreciated the fact that on most of our tables are luxuries 
that do not come to all? Have you realized what varieties of flavor often touch 
your tongue, and how the saccharine and the acid have been afforded your palate ? 
What fruits, what nuts, what meats regale your appetite, while many would be 
glad to get the crusts and rinds and peelings that fall from your table ? For the 
fine flavors and the luxurious viands you have enjoyed for a lifetime, perhaps, 
you have never expressed to God a word of thanksgiving. That is one of the 
ten strings that you ought to have thrummed in praise to God, but you have 
never yet put it in vibration. 

PRAISE FOR. EYESIGHT 

" Have you thanked God for eyesight as originally given to you, or, after it 
was dimmed by age, for the glass that brought the page of the book within the 
compass of the vision ? Have you realized the privation those suffer to whom the 
day is as black as the night, and who never see the face of father, or mother, or 
wife, or child, or friend? Through what painful surgery many have gone to get 
one glimpse of the light ! The eyes — so delicate, and beautiful, and useful — that 
one of them is invaluable ! And most of us have two of these wonders of divine 
mechanism. The man of millions of dollars who recently went blind from 
atrophy of the optic nerve would have been willing to give all his millions and 
become a day laborer if he could have kept off the blindness that gradually crept 
over his vision. 

!( 'You may have noticed how Christ's sympathies were stirred for the blind. 
Ophthalmia has always been prevalent in Palestine, the custom of sleeping on 
the house-tops, exposed to the dew and the flying dust of the dry season, inviting 



THE LAST SERMON HE EVER WROTE 491 

this dreadful disorder. A large percentage of the inhabitants could not tell the 
difference between twelve o'clock at noon and twelve o'clock at night. We are 
told of six of Christ's miracles for the cure of these sightless ones, but I suppose 
they were only specimens of hundreds of restored visions. W T hat a pitiful spec- 
tacle Saul of Tarsus, the mighty man, three days led about in physical as well 
as spiritual darkness ; he who afterwards made Felix tremble by his eloquence, 
and awed the Athenian philosophers on Mars' Hill, and was the only cool- 
headed man in the Alexandria corn ship that went to pieces on the rocks of 
Miletus — once the mighty persecutor Saul — afterwards the glorious evangelist 
Paul, for three days not able to take a safe step without guidance ! 

" Have you ever given thanks for two eyes — media between the soul inside 
and the world outside, media that no one but the infinite God could create? The 
eye — the window of our immortal nature, the gate through which all colors 
march, the picture gallery of the soul. Without the eye this world is a big 
dungeon. I fear that many of us have never given one hearty expression of 
gratitude for this treasure of sight, the loss of which is the greatest disaster 
possible, unless it be the loss of the mind. Those wondrous seven muscles that 
turn the eye, up or down, to right or left, or around. No one but God could 
have created the retina. If we have ever appreciated what God did when he 
gave us two eyes it was when we saw others with obliterated vision. Alas, that 
only through the privation of others we came to a realization of our own blessing ! 
If you had harp in hand and swept all the strings of gratitude, you would have 
struck this, which is one of the most dulcet of the ten strings. 

THE BLESSING OF HEARING 

" Further, notice how many pass through life in silence because the ear 
refuses to do its office. They never hear music, vocal or instrumental. The 
thunder that rolls its full diapason through the heavens does not startle the 
prolonged silence. The air, that has for us so many melodies, has no sweet sound 
for them. They live in a quietude that will not be broken until heaven breaks 
in upon them with its harmonies. The bird voices of the springtime, the chatter 
of the children, the sublime chant of the sea, the solo of the cantatrice, and the 
psalmody of the great worshipping assemblies mean nothing to them. Have we 
devoutly thanked God for these two wonders of our hearing, with which we can 
now put ourselves under the charm of sweet sound, and also carry in our memo- 
ries the infantile song with which our mothers put us to sleep ; and the voices of 
the great prima donnas like Lind, and Patti, and Neilson : and the sound of instru- 
ments like the violin of the Swedish performer, or the cornet of Arbuckle, or the 
mightiest of all instruments, with the hand of Morgan on the keys and his foot 
on the pedal ; or some Sabbath tune like ' Coronation/ in the acclaim of which 
you could hear the crowns of heaven coming down at the feet of Jesus ? Many 
of us have never thanked God for this hearing apparatus of the soul. That is 



492 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

one of the ten strings of gratitude that we ought always to thrum after hearing 
the voice of a loved one, or the last strain of an oratorio, or the clang of a 
cathedral tower. 

REFRESHING SLEEP 

" Further, there are -many who never recognize how much God gives them 
when he gives then sleep. Insomnia is a calamity more widely known in our land 
than in any other. By mid-life, vast multitudes have their nerves so overwrought 
that slumber has to be coaxed, and many are the victims of chloral and morphine. 
Sleeplessness is an American disorder. If it has not touched you, and you can 
rest for seven or eight hours without waking — if, for that length of time in every 
twenty-four hours, you can be free of all care and worriment, and your nerves 
are retuned and your limbs escape from all fatigue, and the rising sun finds 
you a new man, body, mind and soul, you have an advantage that ought to be 
put in prayer and song and congratulation. The French financier, almost wealthy 
enough to purchase a kingdom, but the victim of insomnia, wrote, ' No slumber 
to be bought in any market.' He was right ; sleep is a gratuity from Him who 
never sleeps. O, the felicities of slumber ! Let all who have this real benefac- 
tion celebrate it. That is one of the sweetest strings in all the instrument of- 
ten strings. 

" Further, let us gratefully acknowledge the power of physical locomotion. 
To be able to go where we wish, and all unaided — what a kindness ! What multi- 
tudes have to call in the aid of cane and crutch and invalid's chair, and their 
whole life is a hinderment. How hard to get about w T ith lack of strong and 
healthy and supple limbs. Congratulated ought you all to be if you have the 
usual physical endowment, and sympathized with ought all those be who can 
neither walk, nor climb, nor enter upon any great activities. That is one of the 
thousands of reasons why I hate war with a complete hatred. It takes off with 
bullet, or shell, or surgeon's knife the capacity of men to achieve their own liveli- 
hood or do the work for which they would otherwise be fully qualified. Brave 
men, self-sacrificing men, for the rest of their life are put on the limits, and 
strangely suffer in stormy weather from limbs amputated. 

SAVED FROM MUTILATION 

" How much of the human family in every century has been cut up and shot 
to pieces and passed into mutilation? American manhood had hardly recovered 
from the lacerations of the War of the Revolution when it was called to be carved 
by the swords and stabbed with the bayonets and blackened with the gunpowder 
of 1 812. Hardly recovered was our American manhood from that when the war 
with Mexico began its butchery. Hardly was American manhood recovered from 
that before the Civil War took hold of it and dug its grave-trench through the 
North and its grave-trench through the South. Hardly was our American man- 



THE LAST SERMON HE EVER WROTE 493 

hood recovered from that when the Spanish war came with its malaria and crowded 
hospitals. Thank God that now four of the greatest nations are allied in good 
understanding — the United States, England, Germany and Russia — and if they 
will do the right thing they can forever stop national and international strife and 
put an end to wholesale amputation. There are enough accidents in time of 
peace to keep the race mutilated more than it ever ought to be, and the human 
family needs all its arms, and hands, and feet to do the work that God calls it to do. 
" Further, celebrate on the instrument of ten strings our illumined nights. 
They spread their tents over us, and some of us hardly go out to look at them. 
During the nights other worlds come in sight. The author of my text chimed 
the silver bells in the tower of the midnight heavens, saying : ' When I consider 
the heaven, the work of Thy fingers ; the moon and the stars, which Thou 
hast ordained, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? ' We thank God 
for the day; we ought also to thank Him for the night. Worlds on worlds in 
sight of the naked eye, but more worlds revealed by telescope. At least one night 
in his lifetime every man ought to go into an astronomical observatory and see 
what has been done by the great world-builder. Thank God for lunar and stellar 
illumination ! 

UNIMPAIRED REASON 

" Further, on the instrument of ten strings celebrate the possession of our 
reason. A severe stroke upon the head, or a sudden calamity, or any one of 
fifty kinds of accident, might dethrone our reason and leave us worse off than 
the brute, for the brute has a substitute for reason in what is called instinct ; but 
a man's brain shattered, and he has neither mind nor instinct. The asylums for 
the insane, though all the time multiplying, are not enough to shelter the demented. 
Through the cramming system employed in many of the schools of this country, 
there are tens of thousands of children having their brain depleted. Philosophers 
at ten years of age ; astronomers at eleven years of age ; geologists at twelve years 
of age. They will be first on examination day, but last in all matters of useful 
and successful life. It would be amusing to see how much children are expected 
to learn and know, if it were not connected with the tragedies of damaged intellects 
which follow. Amid the increasing dementia of the world, let us appreciate the 
goodness of God to us if our mental faculties are in equipoise. Voyaging from 
New Zealand to Australia, a storm swooped upon us, and we saw all around us 
fragments of ships that had been caught in the same tempest; and how thankful 
we were, sailing into Sydney harbor, that we had escaped ! So that man and that 
woman whose intellect goes safely through the storms of this life, in which so 
many have foundered, ought every day and every night employ one of the ten 
strings in gratitude for that particular mercy. 

" Another string of this instrument I now touch — friendships, deep and abid- 
ing, by which I refer to those people who, when good or bad motive may be 
ascribed to you, ascribe the good: those concerning whom you do not wonder 



494 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

which side they will take when you are under discussion ; those who would more 
gladly serve you than serve themselves; those to whom you can tell everything 
without reserve ; those who are first in your home, by person or by telegram when 
you have trouble. O, what a blessing to have plenty of friends ! Aye, if you 
have only one good friend, you are blessed in that glad possession. With one 
such friend you can defy the world. But he must be a tried friend. You cannot 
tell who are your real friends till disasters come. As long as you collect vast 
dividends, and have health jocund, and popularity unbounded, you will have 
crowds of seeming friends, but let bankruptcy and invalidism and defamation 
come, and the number of your friends will be ninety-five per cent. off. If you 
have been through some great crisis, and you have one friend left, thank God, and 
celebrate it on sweetest harp-string. 

ft ' While all this is so/ says some one, ' there are so many things that others 
have which I have not.' I reply, it is not what we get, but what we are, that 
decides our happiness. With the bare necessities of life many are unspeakably 
happy, while others with all the luxuries are impersonations of misery. In the 
Roman Empire there was no man more wretched than the Nero who ruled it. 
The porticos of his palace were a mile long. A statue of him in silver and gold, 
one hundred and twenty feet high, stood in the vestibule. The walls of his palace 
were mother-of-pearl and ivory. The ceiling was arranged to shower flowers 
and pour perfumes upon the guests. His wardrobe was so large that he never 
wore a garment twice. His mules were shod with silver. He fished with hooks 
of gold. A thousand carriages accompanied him when he traveled. His crown 
was worth five hundred thousand dollars. He had everything but happiness. 
That never came. Your heart right, all is right ; your heart wrong, all is wrong. 

GLORIES YET UNSEEN 

" But we must tighten the cords of our harp and retune it while we celebrate 
Gospel advantages. The highest style of civilization the world has ever seen is 
American civilization, and it is built out of the Gospel of pardon and good 
morals. That Gospel rocked our cradle, and it will epitaph our grave. It 
sooothes our sorrows, brightens our hopes, inspires our courage, forgives our sins, 
and saves our souls. It takes a man who is all wrong and makes him all right. 
What that Gospel has done for you and me is a story that we can never fully tell. 
What it has done for the w T orld and will yet do for the nations, it will take the 
thousand years of the millennium to celebrate. The grandest churches are yet to 
be built. The mightiest anthems are vet to be hoisted. The greatest victories 
are yet to be gained. The most beautiful Madonnas are yet to be painted. The 
most triumphant processions are yet to march. O, what a world this will be 
when it rotates in its orbit a redeemed planet, girdled with spontaneous harvests 
and enriched by orchards whose fruits are speckless and redundant, and the last 
pain will have been banished, and the last tear wept, and the last groan uttered, 



495 







4-t^r*^ <^i^-<£__ fan^— Xe^^L r^*?^ 

A PAGE OF DR. TALMAGE'S MANUSCRIPT 

Photographed From His Last Written Sermon (see opposite page) 



496 T. DE WITT TALMAGE— HIS LIFE AND WORK 

and there shall be nothing to hurt or destroy in all God's holy mountain ! All 
that and more will come to pass, for ' the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.' 

CELESTIAL FELICITY 

" So far, I have mentioned nine of the ten strings of the instrument of grati- 
tude. I now come to the tenth and the last. I mention it last, that it may be the 
more memorable — heavenly anticipation. By the grace of God we are going t 
move into a place so much better than this, that on arriving we will wonder thai 
we were for so many years so loath to make the transfer. After we have seen 
Christ face to face, and rejoiced over our departed kindred, there are some 
mighty spirits we will want to meet soon after we pass through the gates. We 
want to see and will see David, a mightier king in heaven than he ever was on 
earth ; and we will talk with him about psalmody, and get from him exactly what 
he meant when he talked about the instrument of ten strings. We will confront 
Moses, who will tell of the law-giving on rocking Sinai, and of his mysterious 
burial, with no one but God present. We will see Joshua, and he will tell us of the 
coming down of the walls of Jerico at the blast of the ram's horn, and explain to 
us that miracle — how the sun and moon could stand still without demolition of 
the planetary system. We will see Ruth, and have her tell of the harvest-field 
of Boaz, in which she gleaned for afflicted Naomi. We will see Yashti, and 
hear from her own lips the story of her banishment from the Persian palace by 
the infamous Ahasuerus. 

" We will see and talk with Daniel, and he will tell us how he saw Belshaz- 
zar's banqueting hall turned into a slaughter house, and how the lions greeted 
him with loving fawn instead of stroke of cruel paw. We will see and talk with 
Solomon, whose palaces are gone but whose inspired epigrams stand out stronger 
and stronger as the centuries pass. We will see Paul, and hear from him how T 
Felix trembled before him and the audience of sceptics on Mars' Hill were con- 
founded by his sermon on the brotherhood of man ; what he saw at Ephesus and 
Syracuse, and Philippi, and Rome, and how dark was the Mamertine dungeon, 
and how sharp the ax that beheaded him on the road to Ostia. Yea. we will see 
all the martyrs, the victims of ax, and sword, and fire, and billow. What a thrill 
of excitement for us when we gaze upon the heroes and heroines who gave their 
lives for the truth ! We will see the Gospel proclaimers, Chrysostom and Bour- 
daloue, and Whitefield, and the Wesley s, and John Knox. We will see the great 
Christian poets, Milton, and Dante, and Watts, and Mrs. Hemans, and Frances 
Havergal. Yea ! all the departed Christian men and women of whatever age of 
nation. 

CANTATA INSTEAD OF DIRGES 

" But there will be one focus toward which all eyes will be directed. His 
infancy having slept on pillow of straw ; all the hates of the Herodic government 




THE LAST SERMON HE EVER WROTE 497 

planning for his assassination ; in after time whipped as though he were a criminal ; 
asleep on the cold mountains because no one offered him a lodging; though the 
greatest being who ever touched our earth, derisively called " this fellow; " his last 
hours writhing on spikes of infinite torture ; his lacerated form put in sepulchre. 
Then reanimated, and ascended to be the centre of ah heavenly admiration — 
upon that greatest martyr and mightiest hero of all the centuries we will be per- 
mitted to look. Put that among your heavenly anticipations. 

" Now take down your harp of ten strings and sweep all the chords, making- 
all of them tremble with a great gladness. I have mentioned just ten — delight- 
some food, eyesight, hearing, healthful sleep, power of physical locomotion, 
illumined nights, mental faculties in equipoise, friendships of life, Gospel advant- 
ages and heavenly anticipations. Let us make less complaint and offer more 
thanks ; render less dirge and more cantata. Take paper and pen and write 
down in long columns your blessings. I have recited only ten. To express all 
the mercies God has bestowed you would have to use at least three, and, I think, 
five numerals, for surely they would run up into the hundreds and the thousands. 
' O, give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endureth forever.' 
Get into the habit of rehearsal of the brightnesses of life. 

" Notice how many more fair days there are than foul ; how many more- 
good people than bad you meet. Set your misfortunes to music, as David 
opened his 'dark sayings on a harp.' If it has been low tide heretofore, let the 
surges of mercy that are yet to roll in upon you reach high-water mark. All 
things will work together for your good, and heaven is not far ahead. Wake up 
all the ten strings. Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power be unto Him that 
sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever. Amen ! " 




32 




498 



THE FALLING OF THE LEAVES 



A TRIBUTE TO TALMAGE 

I. 

Oh, preacher, with the broad, white brow, 

And eyes of kindling- light, 
If Heaven-kissed lips could speak but now 

What would the} say to-night? 

ii. 

From pulpit and from printed page 

Truth's banner to unfurl ; 
God's glorious sage, of this fair age, 

Thy words were streams of pearl. 

in. 

Ten million hearts which answered thine 

Are bursting with the thought. 
That empty now is. that dear shrine 

Before which we were taught. 

IV. 

To worship God with all our heart, 

To love our human-kind, 
To use His eyes, if but in part, 

And our true freedom find. 

v. 

And you are gone to meet Him there, 

To see Him face to face ; 
His prophet here, who oft didst share 

His secrets and His grace. 

VI. 

From many lands, o'er leagues of sea, 

Thy written message came ; 
In Heaven must you silent be, 

Or will it be the same? 

VII. 

Oh, couldst thou now to us unfold 

The wonders thou canst see, 
More precious far than fields of gold 
Would be such speech from thee. 
North Adams, Mass. —Anna C. Philips. 

499 



IN MEMORIAM 

Lines on the Translation of Rt-v. T. DeWitt Talmage, D.D. 
BY RI;V. THOMAS C. KASTON, D.D. 

Brave warrior of Zion ! Thy conflict is past, 

Thy sword it is sheathed, and rest conies at the last 

In the palace of angels and God thou art now, 

A bright starlit diadem girdles thy brow. 

What anthems, what paeans of conquest were sung, 
By thousands redeemed, as the pearly gates swung 
Wide open for thee to that empire of love, 
Where service far nobler awaits thee above. 

Farewell, stalwart prince ! None greater appears, 
In all the long record of earth's passing years; 
Who won to the Cross of our Saviour and Lord, 
Such hosts by proclaiming the conqueror's Word. 

O Spirit Divine! Grant new triumphs be won, 
While the mantle prophetic descends on the son ; 
Let a portion twofold to Elisha be given. 
With power to win millions from earth into heaven ! 




500 




•- *& 



j> ' r -p. 



V $ 



I . I K 4 









"o ^ 





























• \ 





















V* 








' 
















- 








3? V*. 








































































^ 












- 

. : 1 






V ^ 



- 
























' 






^ ^ 



\ «< 















